Dots and Pegs

OR, How I Learned to be Pseudo-artsy from Tiny Japanese Products


Welcome to my new blog, placed here just so I can share my slight obsession with old-school video game graphics. It started when I first discovered dot-s at the Giant Robot store in LA.

These little products are self-contained kits that have all the colours you need for a particular bunch of video game characters, and a wealth of patterns to vary your purchase. They're only a few inches high, so the pegs are very tiny and a bit difficult to switch around if you get bored quickly. You can also connect the backboards together and make bigger scenes. The instructions are very simple and have grids on them to make placement that much easier.

Now, since they're imported from Japan and I believe mostly out of production, I started thinking of other ways to create these characters. I've seen lots of people tackle this kind of art, so I got a lot of ideas. There's these things called Pixelblocks that are translucent and do a good job since they're stackable, but I didn't feel like investing in a whole bunch of them. That's when I realised I could pull off the same effect with Lego, and I already had a bunch of those.

So I pulled the boxes out of storage, waded through all the space pieces to get to the basic bricks, and started putting things together. There's plenty of references online, and I took a few lousy pictures with the cellphone camera before I decided I should document these better. So here's a website to stick everything I deem worthy.