22-year old Uchio Tokura is making us look at Minecraft from a whole new perspective. Whenever he posts his work on Reddit, it’s usually upvoted to the top and it’s easy to see why…

This piece is called Aquasomnia. It’s basically a sea witch sculpture with a ton of ocean life detailing and deco. This is something geeks and art fans would want to be recreated in real life and placed on a table for all to see and inspire, myself included.

He has more pieces that delve in his phantasmagorical and abstract imaginations, like “Flower; Corpse” and “The Perfect Marionette” below. These two sculptures are both beautiful and haunting at the same time, like a metal album piece with added soft colours and mists to make it more avant-garde.

The artist spoke with PC Gamer on his inspirations and thoughts when creating these sculptures:

“[These art pieces distanced themselves] from what people would think of Minecraft as a game where you build houses, and instead dove straight into the world of fantasy and abstract sculpting.

In the building community, countless castles, palaces, kingdoms and other structure-related creations had been done before, but no one yet had really focused on sculptures, or what we call it in community, ‘organics.’ From there I created phantasmagorical creatures, abstract sculptures and dreamscapes.”

Currently, he is working in Japan creating new textures and skins in Minecraft via the company Cyclone Designs. Essentially he’s a full-time modder making a living out of in-game customizable goods. He’s been playing the game for 8 years now and has been diligent in turning his passion into a stable job. Most games wished they can support such an economy while still keeping the lights on.

So what’s his secret & techniques? “I like to keep a library of ideas and techniques which I can use later on without having having to reinvent a new process for each project,” said Tokura.

“When building in Minecraft, I treat it more as an editor tool than a survival game. I use tools such as Worldedit and Voxel Sniper which give me a helping hand in placing large masses of blocks at a time as well as copying and pasting specific regions.

The great thing about creating things in Minecraft is that you are in a first person editor and it allows the player to move around in unique ways that allow for hyper-detail in the smallest of places.

I use this to my advantage so I am always flying out and in to make sure everything is in proportion. This not only helps me build quicker and plan more efficiently but most importantly it keeps my mind on the bigger picture so I don’t lose track of my goals.”

Read the full interview here. In the meantime, do visit his Reddit posts and his original image links to help upvote them to cultural relevance.