Gaming Themed Wall Art

My girlfriend and I are gamers by heart, she has an Xbox 1 and I have a PS 4. This was the basis for the project which I made firstly as a decorative piece for our new home, and secondly as a gift for our 2-year anniversary.

I decided since my girlfriend and I are quite big gaming fans, we should get some decorative wall art into our living room. The pixelated idea came from the following video on Youtube, so credit to them:

I started off looking for a nice image of the Xbox & PS logo which I found on Google.

I had lots of pallet wood off-cuts from our Headboard and Pallet Bed Base project which was already sanded to 100 grit. The edges and corners of the blocks were slightly softened with the sand paper.

It was cut down to 80mm x 80mm squares and glued onto a 4mm plywood backing sheet, which I trimmed to size afterwards. Unfortunately there is no photos of the actual construction process, but it's pretty straight forward. 5 rows and columns of 80mm x 80mm squares for a total size of a 400mm square.

Tools used:

1. Circular saw (be very careful when working with power tools)
2. Wood glue (normal white cold glue)
3. Clamps

Here I printed out the .svg logos as images on A3 size paper (it worked out to the perfect size for my project) to be used as a stencil. I laid out the stencil on the pixel board and clamped to see how it would look. The stencil was then glued with normal glue stick for cutting out.

The pixel board was painted in 2 coats of Universal Undercoat we had left over from a previous project. The stencil was cut out using a sharp blade (be careful not to cut yourself).

The blue and green paint I bought from our local hardware store, I had to take a few samples to match the colours as closely as possible. I think it came out pretty close to the correct colour in the end. I painted two coats of each colour, but I would suggest from my experience to rather do thinner & more coats instead. Some of the paint ran underneath the stencil and created globs of paint. Between the coats of paint I sanded it lightly with 200 grit sand paper.

After the mess of the first attempt everything was sanded down and painted which came out much better.

After the paint had dried for a few days I removed the stencil carefully and on some places there had to be touch-ups done with the white paint.

Upon closer inspection there were some flaws with the painting, but with the touch-ups and it having a rustic feel I was happy to complete the project.

I hung the boards on a nail in the workshop to check if it looks good, and in the living room where I planned to hang them originally.

After receiving her gift we decided to add floating shelves and TV wall mounts. With the TV's wall mounted and floating shelves for the consoles installed, it creates quite a lot more space in the living room. We have a fairly small apartment and I think the wall art complements the area very well indeed.