Return of the Autistic Artist!

I haven’t really used my digital art skills for a few years, and I almost forgot about it, but recently I began a project to create the most perfect looking chess set possible on the computer. Not only did I find the perfect look for a standard Chess set but I even managed to make a decent Shogi set as well. Here are the resulting pictures to look at and then below I will explain a little bit of the technical details.

Above is the chess set and below is the shogi set. I used a black and white checkered background because I like it but really, I can use any other colors I want upon request if anyone wants a customized image.

The way I made these worked because there were SVG files of the pieces for these sets included as part of liground Graphical User Interface for playing tons of Chess-like games.

There was a ton of math involved in getting things scaled to the right pixel dimensions. In both cases the images are 720×720 pixels. This is because this is the perfect size for a square image.

You see, the standard video resolution for YouTube and many other sites is 1280×720. This means that a 720 squared image is the biggest square you can fit in a video guaranteed to be visible on almost any device.

A chess board has 8×8 squares and since 720 is 8×90 pixels, each square of the chess board is 90×90 pixels.

And since Shogi is played on a 9×9 board, the size of each square must necessarily be 80×80.

I had to scale the images to be the exact right size to fit the squares when I opened them as layers in GIMP (it’s the free alternative to adobe photoshop). Amazingly I still remembered how to use it well enough to put these pictures together.