Man Creates Portraits Of Malaysian Celebrities With Rubik’s Cubes And The Results Are Amazing
The portraits take 3 to 4 hours to make and requires almost 400 cubes.
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A Pahang man has taken the Internet on a wild ride of twists and turns with his swift finger movements to create portraits of Malaysian celebrities using close to 400 different Rubik’s cubes.
35-year old Zabli Ab Hadi first went viral last week when he uploaded a 49-second video on his TikTok putting together a portrait of celebrity couple Shuib Sepahtu and his late wife Siti Sarah Raisuddin.
@abam.takaful Al Fatihah Buat Almarhumah Siti Sarah ##sitisarah
♬ original sound – dekwaaaaaa
Since the video went viral, he has posted another similar video but this time in response to a request by one of his followers to create one of Siti Nurhaliza, who was affectionately referred to as “Tokti”.
An accidental Internet hit
His portrait of Shuib and Siti Sarah has since received 276K views and took him by surprise as he claims he only uploaded the video after people had asked him to teach them how to upload videos on social media.
Zabli, who is a manager of the Kampung Pianggu Internet Centre in Rompin, has been solving cubes since he was 14, hence why it’s only natural to share his interest in the form of content.
I only knew the video had gone viral that night after being told by a friend, but I did not take it seriously. The next day I was surprised to see it had garnered tens of thousands of likes and shares.
Zabli Ab Hadi to Bernama
RM2,000 of savings to fuel his passion
Thanks to a very supporting wife, Zabli used RM2,000 of the couples’ savings to buy 400 cubes online to create his passion project of producing portraits.
He explains in a video the Siti Nurhaliza portrait took 391 cubes and took 3-4 hours to complete, which was similarly the amount of time and cubes it took for the Shuib and Siti Sarah portrait.
How does he do it?
When watching Zabli’s fingers quickly spinning around the cubes, you’d think it was magic not only to arrange the colours accordingly but to know where to place them too.
And magicians never reveal their secrets, right?
Except Zabli is no magician, and cubing in general takes years of practice, muscle memory and understanding the cube algorithms that makes it look easy.
So, how does he do it? For one, it requires homework like finding the picture you want to turn into a portrait, then using photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop so you can enlarge the photo to see the pixel arrangement.
The photo is then changed to the four colour tones due to the limited colours on the cubes.
Zabli then counts the number of cubes and the colour arrangements through the pixels.
Because the portrait is based on the arrangement of pixels, the final portrait looks clearer if seen at a distance or through photos taken of it.
Will he take commissions?
Since Zabli’s videos have gone viral, there have been many requests to produce portraits.
He tells Bernama that he may consider it, though it will involve additional costs like sheet glass and framing.
His biggest worry? If the arrangement of the cubes collapses during delivery!
Yikes, wouldn’t that be a cubing nightmare!
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