Pixel art lawn mowing previsualisation: paper or pixel

It’s still winter here in Melbourne, Australia. That means the wet weather can make it pretty difficult for me to get out and mow some backyard lawn art on the weekend. With that in mind, I’ve been using Google SketchUp 8 to previsualise new lawn art designs for my backyard lawn.

This lawn art design is based on Jason (@draggin) Toal’s ds106 skull pixel-art. I used the Geo-location > Add location feature to import the satellite image of my backyard into Google SketchUp 8. I then used the Rectangle and Push/Pull tools to create each ‘pixel’ that makes up the skull.

I’ve uploaded a version of the DS106 skull pixel-art lawn design without photo textures to Google’s 3D Warehouse. The 3D Warehouse is a repository of 3D models that have the potential to be used in the 3D Buildings layer on Google Earth. I’ll need to complete the  photo textures for the DS106 skull pixel-art lawn model before it has a chance to be reviewed against the Google Earth acceptance criteria.  In the meantime, you can download the model and place it in your backyard or a patch grassy land in your area.

A screen capture of the 30cm x 30cm DS106 skull pixel-art lawn design.

A screen capture of a magnified view of the 30cm x 30cm DS106 skull pixel-art lawn design.

The DS106 skull pixel-art lawn design SketchUp’d and uploaded to the 3D Warehouse!