I don’t necessarily want someone to come into my house and immediately know that so much of my spare time is spent sitting in front of a screen—there, I said it. So many video game posters and prints you can get are so garish and obvious, sometimes you just need something a bit more subtle. Especially when making your house as aesthetically pleasing as possible is more popular than ever.
Character Select
Welcome to Character Select, a weekly column where PC Gamer takes a look at the art and cosplay created by you. Each week, I’ll highlight a few of my favourite pieces, spotlight and interview creators and artists, or generally just chew your ear off about the talents of the gaming community.
Holly Sweet Illustration has answered my prayers, creating a museum-esque series of wildlife identification prints inspired by video games. Instead of stripping sprites, flowers, and foragables from the games themselves, each piece of the natural (virtual) world has been redesigned in watercolours to replicate a vintage style to make it look like something straight out of the Natural History Museum—and I’m utterly obsessed.
These prints span all sorts of games too. Whether you’re an avid player of The Sims and want your decor to pay homage to your beloved Cow Plant, or if you want to stop and smell the Nirnroot in Skyrim, or even take a break from trudging through the Wasteland in Fallout, Holly Sweet has you covered. Yes, I’m amazed at the variety of games on offer, but I’m more impressed with just how many plants I’ve missed in the vast majority of these games now they’re in front of me.
However, one of my favourite pieces from Holly Sweet has to be the Flowers and Fungi of Red Dead Redemption. I swear, I spent more time riding around on horseback tracking down all the wildlife I possibly could so Arthur could sketch them in his journal than I did doing the normal gunslinging activities expected from a cowboy. I mean, when you make a world so big and full of life, who isn’t going to make the most of it? Someone who’s keen to finish the story, probably, but the foraging quests are some of my fondest memories of my time around Valentine.
I find the Flowers of Fungi of Minecraft print impressive too, because everything looks so familiar yet lacks the blocky appearance we’re used to seeing with Minecraft’s wildlife. I know that the majority of plants in-game are based off their real-life counterparts, so at least there are plenty of reference images for those. But still, it’s such a subtle piece of Minecraft art, anyone who hasn’t spent hours in the Overworld wouldn’t immediately make the connection when they see it, it’s such a case of “if you know, you know” which I love.
The same goes for the Flowers and Fungi of Stardew Valley, though I think this could probably be a print series within itself given how many crops and creatures the game is home to. You’ve got your realistic plants like daffodils, sweet peas, and sunflowers, but you’ve also got Stardew’s own, like the fairy rose and magma cap mushroom. You probably wouldn’t even realise this until you read the information at the bottom of the print listing all the plants.
It’s not just flowers and fungi either. Holly Sweet has branched out to create entomology prints for video game critters like the Butterflies of Animal Crossing and the Spiders of Pokémon, which I would love to see more of, but can only imagine how much time goes into making the unrealistic bugs in games like Pokémon look like something you’d find lingering in the corners of your house. It’s probably best I don’t spend any amount of time brainstorming, given how just typing about spiders gives me the heebie jeebies—but the prints are there, so I don’t have to!
