All 222 MPs on MyMP were drawn by ONE guy. Here’s some weird edits he had to make.

See these?

One guy made all 222 Members of Parliament of our esteemed Dewan Rakyat for this website called MyMP, which you might’ve heard of; we’ve actually talked about them before in two of our previous articles. Long story short, MyMP has pretty in-depth dirt info on our MPs – heck, you can think of the website as sort of a compilation of Parliamentary “report cards” of our politicians.

Anywho, back to the one guy behind MyMP’s artwork: Yee I-Van. He’s a local artist who’s got more than a decade’s experience under his utility belt and also founded his own company, Alchymy Creative. We’ve been itching to talk to him ever since MyMP was first launched, cuz we wanted to know what the process was like turning MPs into pixelized versions of themselves, and finally, we managed to get a hold of him. Thankfully, I-Van was very accommodating as we asked him many, many insipid questions, and one of the things he told us was that…

Tun M, Anwar and KJ were the hardest to draw

It’s apparent even to art-blind people like us at CILISOS that miniaturizing one human being into pixels is tough work, much less over two hundred of them, and I-Van confirmed it during our interview. According to him, pixels can be tricky to work with cuz there’s only so much space you’re allotted. One pixel out of place, and you have a Cronenberg mutant (wubba lubba dub-dub) on your hands.

Since the number of pixels and colors we used were limited, that was also quite limiting to make so many different versions distinguishable from each other.

Oh, and did we mention how much time it took him for each MP? Depending on  the individual’s “complexity”, it took him an average of 15 to 30 minutes for most MPs, and that usually meant he could only do around four to five a day while running his own business. All said and done, it took him about 2 months to complete all 222 MPs for the site’s launch.

As for the MPs that were the hardest to draw, I-Van’s unholy trinity were:

Tun Mahathir, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, Khairy Jamaluddin were all challenging to draw as many people are familiar with them and can tell if they looked funny.

He did, however, brought up the fact that MPs with strong features that could be exaggerated are the most fun to draw – someone with a “big nose or a large forehead” were more interesting to draw than a regular ol’ person. Hey, no shade, man, it’s a compliment.

Those weren’t the only challenges I-Van faced, though, because…

Some MPs asked him to change how their “character” looked

Y’know, we get it. Say you’re getting a portrait of yourself done or your picture taken (even if it’s just for a flex post on Instagram), you want to look your best. And some MPs want to look their best when their likeness is going up on the internet. Whatever goes up on the Internet stays there forever, right? Plus, if you think about it, they were just doing what we’d do in any RPG where you can create a custom character. I-Van asked us not to disclose any names, but some of the requests he got from MPs to change their 8-bit avatar were to:

• Adjust their clothes or accessories
• Make their complexion fairer
• Make their forehead BIGGER

There is one person we can mention by name – the MP for Lembah Pantai, Fahmi Fadzil – whom the team decided internally to have his hair parted to one side, with a little wave:

I figured something was wrong with his hair. It was tooo… military. Figured out he’s got a signature wave in his hair – Lau Chak Onn, one of the founders of MyMP, in an interview with CILISOS

An upside of these requests help I-Van recreate the MPs accurately and distinct enough from each other so that they’re recognizable by the public.

Speaking of going public…

You can now buy these 8-bit MP’s as NFT’s

In case you didn’t know, MyMP isn’t funded by any one individual or any political party – all (or almost) of the people who do the research, updating of the database, website maintenance and everything else that keeps MyMP running are volunteers.

To keep this valuable resource going (and so that they can start paying the volunteers), they’ve recently launched their “NOW, EVERYONE Can Buy MPs!” campaign. Yes, the buying of MPs isn’t limited to the rich elite any longer (cough cough)! You too can have MPs in your back pocket in the form of NFTs, which are available here . That’s one of one ways you can support the site, or if you’re so inclined, they’re also accepting donations and looking for volunteers; you can sign up to be one here.

Before we sign off, we’d like to give I-Van a huge shoutout for taking the time to answer or questions. If you’d like to check out or support his work, here’s his company’s Instagram page!