A three-layer mosaic of a male athlete, kneeling on a gym mat. Sections of the various layers were masked to allow lower layers to show through.
Mosaic
Pixelation is frequently used to censor images that some would consider pornographic or obscene. But can pixelation be an art form in its own right? That’s what these images explore.
I have written a series of Linux shell scripts to tear apart each photo and reproduce it as a series of increasingly granular mosaics, in which each tile is a single, flat colour. I rearrange these tiles on my digital canvas, selecting from the fine, medium and coarse matrices in each instance to manually control the level of detail across the image. The result is reminiscent of the loose, broad strokes that it’s possible to produce when using oil or acrylic paint.
Mo-mo-Mona
Mosaic of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Mona Lisa. COpen the full post for a close-up of the face.
Girl with a Pearl
Mosaic of Vermeer’s picture of Girl with a Pearl Earring, printed on A3 paper. The full post includes a close-up of the face.
Spacewalk
Mosaic of astronaut Bruce McCandless II performing a spacewalk (extra vehicular activity, or EVA) in February 1984 as fart of the Space Shuttle mission STS-11. The original photo was taken by NASA. The mosaic is made using my own algorithms, which are used to create tiles of three different sizes, which are then selectively masked by hand. All work is done on Linux using my own code at the Terminal, with finishing touches applied in GIMP.
Samuel mosaic
Mosaic photography of Samuel, who posed remotely. The image is composed of three mosaics with low- medium and high definition tiles sliced and reassembled using my own algorithm.
Hockneyspool mosaic
This is an A3 mosaic, composed of flat colours, using a pose by Hockneyspool captured over Zoom.
Girl with a Pixel Earring
A mosaic of the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring, created using a Linux shell script, and edited in Affinity Designer.
Mosaic of lightbydan
Three-layer mosaic of flat tone squares based on a selfie by lightbydan. A3 size, using three large spreadsheets as raw data for the resulting SVG.