Mother's Day Tetris

Acrylic on canvas paper, 8" x 10" (not including matte or frame). May 2004.

I decided I would make use of my painting abilities and paint my mom something for mother's day. The problem was: what would it be? I had already drawn her a picture of her cats a few years ago, so I wanted to try something different. I don't know how I thought of this, but I painted her a (made-up) screenshot of Tetris Max, one of her favorite pasttimes. Click on the painting for a larger image.

The process of making this was more involved than you might think. I found a screenshot of the game on the internet, which was actually quite difficult thanks to the fact that the game has been retracted by its makers due to copyright infringement. Once I got a screenshot, I used photoshop to manipulate the tetris pieces so that two tetrises in a row were going to happen (next piece is a straigh-four). I suppose if I was super-cool I could have figured out a situation where it would have been a real double tetris: one where the second tetris happens as a result of the first one. I then used a ruler to pencil the borders of the playing areas, and then pencilled a grid with measured spaces. I used colored pencil to lightly shade each piece, so I would remember what I intended on coloring them later without having to refer to my photoshop mockup. I created the flowery background and then the black areas, waited for them to dry and then did the rest. Each tetris piece was painted in a solid color, after which a variant of that color was painted in the center of each block that made up the piece. Not using masking tape or a ruler for the painting made it very difficult to keep the lines straight. I have vowed to never try to paint straight lines again :^)