In my city they organize an annual community Halloween parade. The community is invited to join (costumes encouraged) and march around downtown escorted by the local police and fire department—accompanied by the high school marching band. My son loves all things Minecraft. So naturally his Halloween costume (Netherite Knight) was related to the game. So I decided to surprise him with my own Minecraft themed facade. Steve!

While I don’t have any images from the beginning stages I can quickly describe them. First I took a look at images of how Steve is rendered within Minecraft. The main objective of my costume was to craft a mask to wear. The clothes are pretty ordinary and not unique enough to convey the costume. So the head piece needed to be convincing.

His head is cube-shaped like everything else in the game is cube-shaped. And the pixelated look of the face also make it look like it’s made of cubes as well. I counted the pixels of his overall face and observed an 8×8 grid pattern. I crafted a couple prototype cubes to determine the right size. I settled on a final dimension of a 14 inch six-sided cube.

To map the grid on the mask I divided 14 inches by 8 which gave me 1.75 inches. So I set out to cutting up 1.75×1.75 inch paper squares in various colors. These would serve to emulate the square-pixel look of the face in the game. I experimented with different configurations until I got the look I wanted.

Why Paper: I thought about painting or drawing the face onto the mask. But ultimately I felt like the paper squares would pay homage to a core aspect of the Minecraft world…that everything is just made of squares/cubes.

After I got them in position I used a spray on adhesive to glue one row at a time. Using a spare piece of cardboard to mask the areas yet to be glued. After drying it was time to test the initial fit.

The scale worked well with my build and worked to give the same blocky look the game has. I just needed a way to have it not only stay on my head—but also raise the box enough so the bottom didn’t rest on my shoulders. That made it topsy-turvy as it rocked on my shoulders. I found a couple pieces of foam insulations for a window air conditioner until. I shaped it into a crown shape that would hold onto my head while raising the box up off my shoulders. A little hot glue and, voila!

I cut flaps for the eye holes. So I could see out but would still keep my eyes partially obfuscated from others.

The maiden voyage was for the community Halloween parade my city hosts. This gave me an opportunity to do a test run. A few tweaks and now it’s ready for the big night on Saturday.

Happy Halloween!!!