Artist Spotlight: Dan Cattell

Country: United States

Medium of Art: Pixelated Costumes (CosPIX)

Facebook.com/dancattellart | Chozoboy.deviantart.com

Penny-pinching was the catalyst behind these ingenious fan-favorite ensembles, made of simple supplies including acrylic paint, canvas, and cardboard. “Frugality, the greatest motivator for creativity!” began Dan Cattell, the mastermind behind his new breed of costumes called “CosPIX”. “I saw a cardboard District 9 prawn costume and that led me to realize that cardboard is a cheap and workable base material.”

As a lifelong dabbler in art, inspiration has come from many facets of life for Cattell, such as brass fastener puppets, 2D animation, sprite art, optical illusions, and more explicitly, works from Alexa Meade and Picasso. Nintendo was also a longtime inspiration. “I studied animation and arts at Rutgers University specifically because I was inspired by Nintendo’s game design philosophies,” Cattell explained.

“I studied animation and arts at Rutgers University specifically because I was inspired by Nintendo’s game design philosophies.”

“As a 3D animator, I’m generally expected to be able to create realistic images in a digital environment. The costumes were an inversion of that. I wanted to share a space with the characters and worlds of older Nintendo games, and I wanted to have that bit of nostalgia suddenly step unexpectedly into the lives of others, too.”

Much of Cattell’s work is a feat of engineering as well as art. “I begin by researching the art and characters of games, and how the limbs and pieces of the characters that I am considering move. I then create proportions studies to make sure that the human limb joints will match up to how the character’s pieces rotate. This step also ensures that the costumer is sufficiently hidden behind the 2D costume.”

This process requires determining the exact pixel-to-inch ratio in order to set the scale. He then draws out grids to that scale, and cuts materials prior to painting, ensuring the backside of each piece is black. “The costumer wears all black, like a stagehand, and the pieces are strapped on in a way that make a sandwich of them and of each segment of their limbs,” Cattell continued. “The result is a costume that becomes two-dimensional when viewed from either side and vanishes when viewed from the front.”

Cattell’s work has received official recognition from Nintendo; his first two ensembles were featured in Nintendo Power. In the callout, the editor mentioned wanting to see him bring to life Super Metroid’s Ridley. And so Cattell did. “I submitted their article to Rutgers for a sculpture research grant and they paid for the materials for my 10-foot behemoth, designed to-scale with Samus.” Ridley also made it into the community column of the magazine.

“My personal style boils down to creatively reinterpreting the world through my personal interests. Pixel ‘sculpture’ has become my identifiable artist brand ever since inventing the costumes in 2010. I love animation and illusions and gaming, so they just happened to meld together in my mind this way. The concept is the art of it.”