Overview

I have been a fan of Homestuck since 2010, so I decided to create an inlay of Karkat Vantas, one of my favourite characters. Homestuck thankfully has pixel art sprites for Karkat in Alterniabound, which helped; however, I had to modify the sprite to work with the reduced colour palette. Every time I see the inlay hanging on the wall, it makes me happy.

Materials

I bought all the rings used in this project from The Ring Lord. Here are the rings used in this project:

Item Option Details
Bright Gold Rings 16 SWG, 1/4” ID Bright Aluminum rings in gold
Bright Black Rings 16 SWG, 1/4” ID Bright Aluminum rings in black
Matte Frost Rings 16 SWG, 1/4” ID Matte Aluminum rings in frost
Matte Orange Rings 16 SWG, 1/4” ID Matte Aluminum rings in orange
Matte Titanium Grey Rings 16 SWG, 1/4” ID Matte Aluminum rings in titanum grey

Notes

Designing the Inlay

Finding a starting point for the design was easy, since Alterniabound (an interactive page) lets you control Karkat, represented as a pixel art sprite (shown here). The original sprite uses various shades of grey and black to add depth. When I ran the base image through Pixel Art Helper to find the closest colours, the result was messy and poorly simplified, as the palette only had one white, one grey and one black. This meant I had to simplify the sprite’s colour palette. To do so, I opened the original image with Pixelorama and created these modified versions. I then used Pixel Art Helper to create a preview of the inlay (shown here). The result was barely recognizable, so I used Pixel Art Helper to double each dimension, giving the clearer result shown here.

Creating & Hanging The Inlay

As my fifth European 4-in-1 inlay, it was fairly easy to weave; however, it still took me about 25 hours to turn all 2320 rings into one inlay. To hang the inlay, I made a hanger from 16 SWG Bright Aluminum wire by starting with a length of wire, bending it into a triangle, feeding it through the inlay’s top row of rings, and bending the ends into hooks locked in place by gravity. The inlay is almost too heavy to hang on a wire hanger; I had to make the hanger slightly concave to account for the sag caused by its weight. I am keeping an eye on it in case I need to change the hanging method.

Conclusion

This is actually my largest inlay to date (16 more rings than the Metroid Inlay), and I am very happy with the result. Every time I see it hanging on the wall and see how nice it looks, it makes me happy. The inlay has been hanging for 7 days, and the hanger is holding up, which is good news, though I will probably stop using wire hangers for inlays this large. Overall, I am very happy with the inlay, and I look forward to eventually making an inlay of each of the main 12 trolls.

Pictures

Flat

Hanging

Original Alteriabound Sprite

source

Modified Sprites




1×1 Inlay Preview

Final Inlay Preview

In Progress