
Like in real life, Minecraft paintings are a good way to decorate your home base. Find a good spot to place this item and you will bring a little more life with some pixelated art. While paintings don’t have much more of a use than idly sitting on the side of a block, there are some aspects you might not have known about. Here is everything you need to know about paintings in Minecraft.
How to make a painting in Minecraft
To craft a Minecraft painting, you will need one block of wool and eight sticks. It doesn’t matter what color the wool is; you can gather tons of sheep and wood to load up on the materials needed. For the crafting recipe painting textures, place the wool in the center slot, with the sticks surrounding it in all of the other spaces.

How to place paintings in your Minecraft world
Minecraft paintings can only be placed on the side of blocks; they do not have a way to stand on the ground like an easel or something. You can also create secret doorways with paintings. To do this, you will need to place signs on the outer edge of a block so the painting goes over it. When this happens, players can walk through the painting. Hit paintings disappear and fall on the ground to be placed again.

The painting canvases that appear on your wall will largely depend on how much free space is on the wall. Here are the various sizes that paintings can extend to:
- 1×1
- 1X2
- 2×1
- 2X2
- 3X3
- 3×4
- 4×2
- 4X3
- 4X4
What are all of the paintings in Minecraft?
As of this writing, there are a total of 46 Minecraft paintings released that you can get when you use this item. All the paintings are below with a breakdown of their inspirations and who made them. Almost all of them are based on real-world paintings or video games. The order we list them is the same as the screenshots provided.
1×1 paintings

- Paradisträd – Means “jade plant” in Swedish (Mojang, the development team for Minecraft, and the artists who made these paintings are based in Sweden).
- Kebab med tre Pepperoni – Means “kebab with three pepperonis.” A pixelated take on an original painting by artist Kristoffer Zetterstrand that features three green chili peppers.
- De_Aztec – A pixelated take on a Counter-Strike map called Aztec.
- Target Successfully Bombed – A pixelated take on another Counter-Strike video game series map called Dust II.
- Albanian – A pixelated take on a painting that artist Kristoffer Zetterstrand made in art school. It depicts a man in a fez holding a stick.
- Meditative – A pixelated inspiration of Salvador Dali’s Meditative Rose painting.
- Wasteland – A pixelated take of another original painting made by artist Kristoffer Zetterstrand. It depicts a bunny sitting on a window sill overlooking a desert wasteland.
- De-Aztec – Another pixelated take on the Aztec map from Counter-Strike, but in a different location.
1×2 paintings

- Wanderer – Another Kristoffer Zetterstrand painting that was put into the game. This one borrows the character from Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and puts him in an arctic setting.
- Prairie Ride – A Minecraft take on The Cowboy by Frederic Remington. The original Minecraft character, Noor, is riding a horse.
- Graham – Depicts King Graham from the classic game series King’s Quest. The in-game image actually cuts off the rest of the painting that was taken from Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber by Juan Sánchez Cotán.
2×1 paintings

- Sunset_dense – The first of five more painting canvases is a pixelated take on a painting of mountains with a sunset in the background made by artist Kristoffer Zetterstrand.
- Creebet – A pixelated take on Kristoffer Zetterstrand’s Seaside, but the plant was replaced with a creeper head.
- Bonjour Monsieur Courbet – Based on Gustave Courbet’s painting The Meeting, but is a black and white alteration with two of the bearded man facing each other.
- The Pool – Pixelated take on an original Kristoffer Zetterstrand painting. Five people relax by a cubical pool. None of them are wearing clothes but are covered up by towels.
- Seaside – The original pixelated take on Seaside without the creeper head.
2×2 paintings

- The Stage is Set – A background taken from Space Quest I that also incorporates two King Grahams from the King’s Quest video game series. Both were Sierra Entertainment games.
- Humble – A Minecraft take on American Gothic by Grant Wood. The farmer couple have been replaced with villagers.
- Skull and Roses – The skull here is taken from Kristoffer Zetterstrand’s Moonlight Installation, and roses have been added.
- The Void – Another pixelated take on an original Zetterstrand painting that features an angel praying into a dark void.
- Baroque – A painting of a Minecraft cake, sunflower, and pottery. Rather than being inspired by a singular painting, this is in reference to the Baroque painting movement that really took off in the early 1600s.
- Wither – An original painting depicting the moment the Wither is made when you place three wither skeleton skulls on top of four soul sand blocks placed in a T-formation.
- Match – Another Zetterstrand original, which depicts someone lighting a match over pixelated fire.
- Bust – Zetterstrand original that shows a bust of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius surrounded by pixelated fire.
3×3 paintings

- Fern – Original Zetterstrand painting that you can see at the 1:13 mark on this Minecraft video. Shows a potted fern on a table beside a pixelated fire and a piece of paper.
- Tides – Original Zetterstrand painting that features someone in the fetal position. There is a black dog nearby, and they are positioned on some cliffs above water.
- Endboss – Zetterstrand painting. Features an all-white version of King Graham returns here, accompanied by the top half of a skeleton being held over a checkerboard floor.
- Bouquet – Zetterstrand painting that features a man sitting on some stairs next to a bouquet of flowers.
- Cavebird – Zetterstrand painting with a bird flying near a cliff in the distance.
- Sunflowers – Zetterstrand painting with a 2D sunflower sitting next to real potted sunflowers.
- Owlemons – Pixelated take on Zetterstrand’s Lemons and Owl. A 2D owl peeks out of a box next to some lemons. The background is taken from An Old Man and his Grandson by Domenico Ghirlandaio.
- Cotán – Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber by Juan Sánchez Cotán makes a return here but is replaced with a golden apple and glistering watermelon.
3×4 paintings

- Backyard – The first of the two paintings that take up 3×4 blocks has an environment taken from The Courtyard of a House in Delft by Pieter de Hooch and the women come from Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii.
- Pond – Pixelated take on Zetterstrand’s Death and the Maiden.
4×2 paintings

- Finding – Pixelated take on Zetterstrand’s The Find. A man peers down a hole in front of some ruins.
- Lowmist – Pixelated take from Zetterstrand that we think depicts mountains if you could see through them.
- Fighters – Zetterstrand takes characters from the 1985 game Way of the Exploding Fist fight on a beach taken from Indian Summer, Vermont by Willard Metcalf.
- Changing – Pixelated take on Zetterstrand’s Change of Set that has someone changing in front of a gloomy mountain and some trees around sunset. The pixelated fire we’ve seen before also makes a return here.
- Passage – Pixelated take on Zetterstrand’s The Passage. A human skeleton stands in front of some large animal skeleton.
4×3 paintings

- Mortal Coil – Zetterstrand art that has a character from the 1998 game Grim Fandango sitting in what appears to be a coffin.
- Kong – An (even more) pixelated take on the final level from the original Donkey Kong game. The Zetterstrand work had more cut out of it.
4×4 paintings

- Pointer – Pixelated take on Zetterstrand pointing at a character from the 1987 game Internation Karate +. The background comes from Winter Landscape with Church by Caspar David Friedrich.
- Skull on Fire – Pixelated take on a Zetterstrand painting of a burning skull painting texture covered in pixelated fire sitting in a Minecraft world at night.
- Orb – Zetterstrand’s The Orb features a light in a darker environment from St. Francis in Ecstasy by Giovanni Bellini.
- Pigscene – Zetterstrand RGB painting, but a pig’s head has been implemented where there is usually red, green, and blue coloring.
- Unpacked – A recreation of the image that appeared for the default Minecraft texture pack. You can see it at the 3:53 mark in this Minecraft art video.
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John has been writing about video games for the better part of a decade. He enjoys a wide variety of games as long as it is fun, has good movement, or implements something interesting in its story. He co-founded the indie media site Game Sandwich and is always looking for the next big gaming adventure to capture his imagination.
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