Hyper-Realistic Splatoon 2 Images Are Becoming A Thing

Splatoon 2‘s been out for a few days now, and players keen to post their images in-game are moving beyondhasty scribbles and into the realm of painstaking recreations of real-world people, places and things. One guy’s even created a program to do it automatically.

Any image can be turned into a Splatoon 2 graphic, as long as you have a metric ton of patience and an image editing program. Take Sad Keanu here. I clipped the original image down to 320 by 120 pixels, which is the size of the Splatoon 2 canvas.

Then I changed the image mode to indexed color, setting the number of colors to 3, the lowest setting.

Now all I have to do is zoom in and copy every single pixel, line by line. It takes FOREVER. Here’s my current work in progress:

That’s a good 20 minutes of work, during which I completed six lines out of 120.

There are shortcuts that can be taken if you have the right equipment. Here’s an image created via a special “printer” created by Github’s ShinyQuagsire23.

Instead of entering the image by hand, Shiny herecreated a programthat utilizes the Switch’s newly-patched ability to accept controllers like Hori’s Pokken Tournament Pro Pad to send custom inputs to the game. Basically he tricks the Switch into thinking a Pro Pad is attached, but it’s really a custom device programmed to enter in the correct sequence of movements and button presses to create the image. It’s sort of like a tool-assisted run, taking about an hour to complete.

If you don’t have the hardware or the patience, flipping through other people’s creations is the next best thing. Here are some of our favorites.

Is this the beginning of something wonderful, or the beginning of the end of Splatoon post art?