Real internationalized pieces - Day 1

Hey everyone. While I was thinking of ways to promote shogi today, I came up with a great idea - making real internationalized pieces! I had two options for this: Make them out of paper, or transform one of my shogi sets into an internationalized set. Since I thought it would be rather cool to have (what I believe to be) the first real set featuring Hidetchi's internationalized piece design, I decided to break out the sand paper and start working on my own set.


These are the materials I'm using: 120 sandpaper, wooden shogi pieces, black and red permanent markers, mechanical pencil, and reference sheets for Hidetchi's designs.


Here's what the King General looked like while I was sanding him. It was quite sad to look at a shogi piece like this, but it made me feel better when I thought about what it would look like when it was done.


With the kanji completely erased, I drew a light pencil drawing of the King General on the piece...


...Then I outlined that drawing in permanent marker, and erased the stray pencil marks.


And then I wrote Hidetchi's name on the bottom of the King General, to credit him for the design. You can see the Jeweled General mid-sanding in this picture.


These are the pieces I have finished at the end of day 1: King General, Jeweled General, two Rooks, two Bishops, and one Gold General. It's much more work than I was expecting! But it'll be worth it.

By the way, here's a picture of the Dragon and the Horse:




I wish I had made the Horses a little better. They aren't centered enough. They were hard to draw! But I think it turned out okay.

Uploading Custom BCMShogi Graphics

I've made a video presenting how to upload custom graphics into BCMShogi. I made this primarily so that people can upload Hidetchi's internationalized pieces into themes other than the HIDETCHI theme, which may not fit on people's monitor resolutions (it doesn't on mine, for example).

If you're coming here from my video, here are the files I presented in the video:

Bona-sized Hidetchi Internationalized Pieces


DiagramTiny Hidetchi Internationalized Pieces


I obtained both of these images from Hidetchi's blog. The Bona-sized pieces were resized by myself in Photoshop.

You can find my custom Kinryuu graphics, specifically made for the Bona theme, in my last post. You can use my Kinryuu pieces in any way as long as it is not for commercial use. I'd appreciate if you contact me before using my Kinryuu pieces.