AuthorTopic: GR#081 - You Can Design a Kindergarten's Bathroom Pixel Art  (Read 50192 times)

Offline Bloodfart

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*I am interested in more than one, possibly many, artists contributing to different walls.

My wife and I own a kindergarten and we are moving to a new place. A while ago when making up a bathroom I came across small colored tiles that can be used in tiling to make mosaics. I thought it would be awesome to make some pixel art in the children's bathrooms because I had some experience making it in the game Minecraft.

Now the opportunity has come but I don't have the time available to design the art for all of the walls (possibly more than 16 total surfaces), and I would love to have some variety in the art styles, plus very professional, clean-looking designs. I'm talking not just game art, but isometric landscapes/cityscapes, surrealism, abstract, whatever you want to make.

What better way to find amazing pixel art than asking communities on the internet? If you or someone you know may be interested, please reply.

What I am requesting:

Design fairly low resolution pixel art images, collages, or whatever awesome, and email it to me. The dimensions and walls are listed in the documents below. If you are interested please mention in thread what wall you wish to take so I know what goes where. Just a nice clean jpg, png, or bmp would be perfect so I can print it on 11x17 and hand it to the workers to follow.

What I am offering:

I will keep the thread up to date with progress in the form of text and photographs! Then when the bathrooms are finished i'll take pictures of them as well! Your pixel art will have a very long life bringing smiles, excitement, joy, and inspiration to young kids.

Additional infomation:

The school is an English school located in China. Chinese business dealings are often flaky, confusing, and full of misunderstandings. It is possible (though we hope not) that something could go wrong and we can't move into the new school or decorate. However we have signed the property rental papers and everything looks good at the moment.

The wall's resolutions vary but they all use 5cm tiles with a mortar estimated to be between 1-2mm on average. When i did the math for calculating the resolution requirements I averaged in 1.5mm for mortar the the images should be a bit larger than the wall resolution so I can easily compensate for inaccuracy.

Also the placement of toilets, sinks, towel racks, and more can't be organized in advance of the tile planning because it may take serious organizing to get the workers to follow the design docs.

We may get started tiling walls within days.

If you choose to do any walls please note the bathroom number and wall number together. The resolution for the pixel art should be a bit larger than the tiling resolution in the design docs; tiles long by tall, not cm.

Here are the design docs followed by examples of tiles with at least a light and dark variant of each major colour. The tiles in the picture are half the size of the ones that I will be using:

*update: bathroom 2 will be taken out to increase classroom space since bathroom 1 is very large. Also see bathroom 3 update attachment.

http://postimage.org/gallery/ceo5mg6bw/

Bathroom 3 update
http://postimage.org/image/ixq8ev7cr/

To anyone interested, Thank you. I know there's people out there that would think this an awesome, easy project, and the tiling will come out beautifully; i'm sure.

admin@rootsnshoots.org

Any more questions please post them; i'll check in often.
« Last Edit: October 29, 2011, 03:39:54 am by Bloodfart »

Offline Mathias

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Re: You Can Design a Kindergarten's Bathroom Pixel Art™

Reply #1 on: October 27, 2011, 07:04:09 am
This interests me. I might help out with this. Online porty. PixelJoint gallery. I even have a lot of experience doing tile, walls and floors.

When do you have to start tiling? What's the deadline? Before that time you need to have all art finalized. That could take a while.

The floorplans you've given are tiny and rather useless.

If you want help with this, you really should give better information. Unless you can better organize this effort I don't think I'll participate. I would really like to see your idea come to fruition, and not fail, but we need to start of better.


1) Better/larger images of the two floorplans of the two rooms in question.

2) I highly recommend you label all walls with a unique letter and/or number so you can keep all the art straight.

3) Write the corresponding unique name of each wall on the actual walls themselves in big black letters/numbers so the tilers don't mix them up when it's time to tile.

4) Measure all walls and determine the number of tiles in length and height. Factor in all grout joints of course. Be accurate! Otherwise it'll be impossible to design anything detailed that continues across walls and some of it not be cropped when once the tile workers actually install it.

5) Is that really your palette? I'm referring to the tiny pic of tiles you posted. We need to establish the palette.

6) Are you limited to only those tiles?




Additionally, when I think about the space we're discussing, kindergarten classrooms, I wonder what style would be best and how detailed, possibly distracting for the students, it should be. Classrooms are typically painted very simply and with colors that encourage a nurturing atmosphere. There's obviously plenty of color theory behind classroom colors. You should consider all this.

The space isn't some ADD teenager's bedroom, it's for very young students. The tile designs probably shouldn't be too far out.

Why not post pics of the space as is, before anything is done to it?

Offline Bloodfart

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Re: You Can Design a Kindergarten's Bathroom Pixel Art™

Reply #2 on: October 27, 2011, 11:50:46 pm
Hi Mathias thanks for the response,

Sorry about the floorplan pictures. It appears i was mistaken about the thumbnails. I had assumed the thumbnails would be clickable to open into the fullsized jpegs. I will re-upload them and edit the OP.

The tiling is only for the bathrooms. I think anything can be applied in the bathroom as it will always provide for interesting things to look at when the kids are sitting on the toilet :P

In the floorplans (high resolution) you can see that i've measured and calculated the amount of tiles necessary to the best of my ability. The tiles themselves are 5cm x 5cm and the grout is between 1-2mm.

I also thought about the labeling on the walls to keep the art aligned and placed correctly but i'm not sure of the easiest way for the workers to follow it. Bear in mind that I am in China and the quality of the work done by laborers is typically poor. However I will be supervising and having a limited palette helps reduce problems as well.

I think each wall should have separate art as aligning walls together along the corners will likely be a lot of trouble since the grout thickness can't be measured accurately.
« Last Edit: October 27, 2011, 11:57:21 pm by Bloodfart »

Offline Mathias

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Re: You Can Design a Kindergarten's Bathroom Pixel Art™

Reply #3 on: October 28, 2011, 03:29:39 am
Hey there.

Oh right, bathrooms. Not classrooms. Hah that's different.

Ok, so this greatly decreases the scope of the project, which is a good thing.

It still may be possible to have art in corners continue seamlessly as long as the design is really simple. We may see.

___

Now, on to palette. Something massively important.

Looking at your tile samples board I see many tile combos. All glass (make sure they use only white thinset or mastic, not grey!)


Here's a possible issue you'll run into: Look at the blue tile combo in the top middle row of your tile samples pic.



It contains3 shades of blue - What happens if a wall design uses a ton of only the medium blue color for a sky? When you purchase the tile you'll get roughly even amounts of all 3 shades, though you'll need a ton of the medium blue, which means you'll have to buy more sheets of that blue combo just to get enough medium blues. Resulting in much waste.

Plus, the tile workers will have never done this sort of thing before - it's unheard of to have to meticulously cut apart tile sheets and consider little 1x1's individually.



What do you think of the palette problem we have? Are you able to get sheets of only one color? Otherwise, there's gonna be a TON of waste.

I'm located in the central US.
« Last Edit: October 28, 2011, 03:31:46 am by Mathias »

Offline Bloodfart

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Re: You Can Design a Kindergarten's Bathroom Pixel Art™

Reply #4 on: October 28, 2011, 08:17:25 am
So my Chinese isn't good enough to handle dealing with the sellers myself but I tried to make clear to my wife what I want. She assured me first that they have these same tiles colours in 5cm pieces.

I hadn't thought of the fact that they come in tile sheets but when we were at the shop they said they can use the tiles to make any design. If its a matter of paying them for more time to cut apart the sheets, it shouldn't be a problem.

Also she said they will refund money for any excess tiles when we are finished. Not having to worry about and count out specific colour amounts is fantastic; though i'll still likely do some counting with math.

I forgot to take pictures of the bathrooms when i was down there but all I had was my iPod and the light was quite dark anyway.

Offline Mathias

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Re: You Can Design a Kindergarten's Bathroom Pixel Art™

Reply #5 on: October 28, 2011, 10:46:45 am
Does your wife speak Chinese? Is she the one teaching?

So you can return partial tile sheets and get your money back? You typically buy a box of these sort of tile sheets and get about 10 per box. Then you can return unused sheets. But not partial sheets; sheet that have been cut apart and partially used. Nobody wants to the buy them, therefore tile dealers won't buy them back. Better make sure!

But, if you can buy sheets of all one color I guess there's no problem.

We still need to nail down what the palette(s) are for this. I think the artist(s) should define the palette, it's an integral part of the artwork. Do you have color or subject matter preferences? Shall we attempt to depict scenes from Chinese history that the kids might learn about (wait, history in Kindergarten . . ?), or something academic-related? It would make sense. Though I haven't thought about it much.

I suggest 4-8 colors per design. Perhaps we can define about 3 palettes to use. Maybe different palettes per boy's and girl's bathrooms - one would be girl colors, one would be boy colors. Like in The States, does China associate pinks as female and blues as male colors? Haha I have to ask.

We definitely need shots taken of the spaces, in question, before anything is done. Try and get good really good images, please. And it would be ideal if the final photos are taken from the same exact angle for a really cool Before & After composite picture. I'll be honest, the main reason I want to do this is because I want the before and after pics for my portfolio. I love having an odd variety. Plus, I love your idea to apply the pixel art medium as a sort of 'art installation' in a Chinese kindergarten. That's just cool.
« Last Edit: October 28, 2011, 10:53:07 am by Mathias »

Offline Bloodfart

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Re: You Can Design a Kindergarten's Bathroom Pixel Art™

Reply #6 on: October 28, 2011, 11:27:12 am
Quote
Does your wife speak Chinese? Is she the one teaching?

I am the Director of Education and teach most of our english classes.

Quote
So you can return partial tile sheets and get your money back? You typically buy a box of these sort of tile sheets and get about 10 per box. Then you can return unused sheets. But not partial sheets; sheet that have been cut apart and partially used. Nobody wants to the buy them, therefore tile dealers won't buy them back. Better make sure!

My wife assured me that they'd take back unused tiles, and it should have been clear that I will use separate colours to design with. However, people are generally unclear and often confused when communicating with each other here so i'm crossing my fingers but it seems ok.

The palette i think should be limited to 2 shades per colour; a light and a dark. It keeps things simple yet has enough diversity to allow to some depth perception and shading. This is how I would do pixel art in Minecraft for example and it turns out good enough for what I'm thinking. If you think it is necessary then you can add in another shade if you see it in the tile palette.

I don't mind at all mixing up tons of colours into crazy collages of characters and settings, or specific palette-controlled compositions. Really anything goes here.

I don't want the sexes to have anything noticeably catering to sex stereotypes like blue/pink motifs. Plus the bathrooms are unisex anyway in kindergarten.

Bear in mind that this is the first attempt at pixel art tiling. In the future we plan on opening more schools and if this works out as well as i think it can, i will oversee even more detailed and carefully planned projects with higher resolution. Right now we are just far too busy to attempt anything more elaborate than what I am after.

Quote
We definitely need shots taken of the spaces, in question, before anything is done. Try and get good really good images, please. And it would be ideal if the final photos are taken from the same exact angle for a really cool Before & After composite picture. I'll be honest, the main reason I want to do this is because I want the before and after pics for my portfolio. I love having an odd variety. Plus, I love your idea to apply the pixel art medium as a sort of 'art installation' in a Chinese kindergarten. That's just cool.

Ok i will go try to go there tomorrow and take shots of the bathroom walls. I would love to give an artist before and after shots. Plus I will acknowledge the work provided on our website; also under renovations.

« Last Edit: October 28, 2011, 12:57:56 pm by Bloodfart »

Offline Mathias

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Re: You Can Design a Kindergarten's Bathroom Pixel Art™

Reply #7 on: October 28, 2011, 11:55:53 am
(You got a block of your own text in quote tags, almost missed it)

Ok, so how many different colors are you thinking per wall?

Bathrooms are unisex, ok.

Oh so we're treating this a prototype. That's cool. The resolution/size of tiles is no problem. Let's keep it very simple for this first attempt.

-RELEVANT-

Offline Bloodfart

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Re: You Can Design a Kindergarten's Bathroom Pixel Art™

Reply #8 on: October 28, 2011, 01:00:38 pm
Fixed it. I didn't think of using quotes until after I had already written responses in a different order. Then messed up rearranging the order and slapping on quotes. :P

I will work on a wall design now and post it when its done. Though i'm not sure how awesome mine will turn out compared to more practiced artists; I do a lot of drawing and design myself though, just not professionally.

*edited the OP to state that I am interested in possibly many people contributing.
« Last Edit: October 28, 2011, 01:02:16 pm by Bloodfart »

Offline Mathias

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Re: You Can Design a Kindergarten's Bathroom Pixel Art™

Reply #9 on: October 28, 2011, 09:25:58 pm
Np.

You're now going to work on a wall design? Which, where?

I did a ton of legwork for this project today. The information you've given is good, but I wanted to better facilitate the creation of artwork for your walls so I refined and clarified the information. It's funny, not only do I have months of tiling (and wood flooring) installation experience but I also spent 2 years at a big architectural firm, full-time. I've dealt with architectural info 10x more complex.

--THE CHINESE BATHROOMS PIXELIZING PROJECT GUIDE-- (updated)

Blood, you need to thoroughly proof it, though. Nobody should use it until you've had time to review everything I've done in the above image and approve it, first. Once you've done that, I suggest putting a big fat link to it in your OP to attract help. Artists here will find it very helpful.



Some things:

1) Can we not get the dims of the doors in question? (Affecting walls B, K & N)

2) Can we get the location of all sinks and toilets? (Only Bathroom 1 has them drawn)

3) How high are your walls, from floor to ceiling? 8 feet high, as is the standard in The States?
« Last Edit: October 29, 2011, 11:34:46 pm by Mathias »