The format usually places blocks on a flat vertical wall to recreate sprite art, with builders picking wool, terracotta, or concrete blocks whose colors line up with the original sprite's palette3. Common subjects skew heavily toward retro Nintendo sprites, particularly Super Mario and Pokemon, along with anime characters, movie posters, and other internet memes1. Large multiplayer "pixel art servers" were set aside for this kind of building, with each new creation stitched next to older ones across the map1.

By 2011, helper tools like Spritecraft let builders skip the manual palette-mapping step by importing any PNG and outputting a block-by-block build guide5. That lowered the barrier for anyone who wanted to convert an existing image without hand-picking every block, and it helped push output volumes into the thousands on sharing sites like Planet Minecraft6.

A typical build starts by picking a sprite or image, mapping its color palette to the closest matching Minecraft blocks (commonly wool, terracotta, or concrete), then placing blocks column by column on a flat vertical wall so the picture reads correctly from a distance. Tools like Spritecraft can auto-generate the block map from any imported image, which speeds up big builds like full Pokedex walls5.