These are the paintings I've made on DemocracyCraft.
The tools I use are Blender, Aseprite, GIMP, and some homemade Python scripts.
Big snake, wants to eat you. No surprises here!
This is a deliberate use of a composition I would normally use to present a dyad, but with no second subject.
Instead, I've faintly shadowed the area where the second subject would go.
A big part of why I made this one was to learn modifiers in Blender a little bit better. The snake is powered by Mesh Transform!
Pyrex wants you to try a rare vintage.
This was originally planned as a 7x3 landscape composition, but 3x7 portrait turned out to be _markedly_ easier to read.
The part that took the longest was actually the color selection -- I wrote a new program that uses error minimization to assign Minecraft colors more accurately while still keeping the palette manageably small!
A shiny crow approaches a golden rose, an ebony circlet, and a broken blade. Commemorates the Criminal City Nightmare event of August 2025.
This one's sketch differed _dramatically_ in use of color. It was really hard to get the palette to work in Minecraft! Still, we do the best with what we have.
It's my paralegal, Pyrex, playing chess!
Looks like the sun is encroaching on him somewhat fiercely inside his dark mausoleum.
This 6x4 painting is the largest I've ever done and took by far the most time, but most of that time was spent building an abnormally detailed sketch in Blender and doing an abnormally detailed overpaint to simplify out the sketch.
I think it's the best work I've ever done!
Ack!! This one was harder than it probably looks.
The value range of seemingly every object needed to be compressed and many objects were nearly unreadable at small scale.
This one heavily incorporated volumetrics. Why? Well, my standard composition trick is to have a distant backdrop with very subtle color gradation and then some kind of dyad in the foreground.
Putting some smoke in the dragon's mouth meant the wing could be buried behind it.
Art is fun!
This started as a self-portrait, but I had to follow it where the color theory led me.
The shading here was a massive challenge. Typically in my Blender sketches, I put objects in _very_ different verging-on-primary color schemes so it will be easy to assign separate ramps to them during the shading phase.
However, for this one I couldn't convince myself my composition was working, so I shaded the object at close to its authentic appearance.
The model here is actually a lot more detailed than it really needs to be, with a pretty ornate vest and a pillow as well.
Anyway, simplifying that was pretty brutal, and I ended up applying a ton of non-naturalistic compression to the value ranges of each of the background objects.
I sent this to dearev because he kept losing my auctions!
At 6x3, it's my largest painting ever!
The trickiest part of this by far was the delicate shading in the background -- differentiating six shades of grey in Minecraft's awful lighting was very difficult.
The background is an extreme simplification of the garage from the Global Center.
In this image, a necromantic microbat summons an undead serpent with a crystalline wand.
This is about the point where I realized I needed to think really hard about composition before trying much else.
It's also where I realized that compressing the value range of a foreground item into "cartoon" is a great way to make it pop!!
This one was very hard to get right! Turns out that when you Blenderize a highly detailed bat with subtle shading, you lose a lot of detail in the translation to Minecraft.
Still, we get kind of a poppy CGA look out of all the simplification.
These three lizards are the shapeshifting antagonist of my GURPS campaign!
Apparently they're very popular!
This was planned using a very crude Blender model, although the lizard heads were pretty detailed.
These two bats (Rheit and Kubus, from left to right from your perspective) were both drawn freely in GIMP.
I didn't have a lot of confidence about color theory, so I just kept the contrast high and tried to find something harmonious that worked.
This is the first painting I drew for DemocracyCraft!
It's... not very sophisticated! I didn't even sketch it before drawing it.