Exploring Art with Minecraft

My 6 year-old daughter is sitting next to me at the kitchen table. She’s playing Minecraft on her iPod and showing me all of the different animals she has in the game.  She’s knows that I’m working on a Minecraft series  and thinks it’s awesome. Every so often she takes a screen shot of something she’s working on.  Then she brings the image up in a photo editing app and plays with the effects.  I realized she knew how to do this just now. I’m kind of amazed. She’s getting images ready to send to me.  “You can use it in today’s post,” she says happily.

Inside a Minecraft Art Museum

Earlier today, she showed me around her “house in the sky” in one of her worlds. It convinced me that although I love to help my kids learn with Minecraft, their work and play there is valuable without my interference.

Imagination, inventive thought and artistic design are the essence of Minecraft.

Art, like math, is everywhere in Minecraft.  We can expand on this with focused projects, but you can rest assured, this game is giving them an amazing opportunity to explore their creativity.

Ideas and Resources for Exploring Art in Minecraft:

• Create your own art museum. Design and build the museum and fill it with artwork! For an additional challenge, try to replicate the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Guggenheim.
• Design a unique skin. You can find step-by-step directions to do this here.
• Create a pixel art project in Minecraft.  Once you learn the technique for creating pixel art, try creating a drawing on grid paper and convert it to a 3D form. This will help your child learn the principles and tools used for creating digital art.You can find plenty of simple ideas to get you started at this site.

The following tutorial will take you through the basics of creating pixel art in Minecraft:

• Take your  art offline and try out one of these cool Minecraft craft projects.
• For the youngest players, check out the Minecraft Coloring Ebook.

Do you have an additional ideas or suggestions to share? Tell me in the comments section!

This is Day 7 of 10 Days of Minecraft Learning. Looking for more great ideas for your home, homeschool and life? Check out the rest of the 10 Days Series on a variety of topics at the iHomeschool Network Hopscotch!