I want to share about my first art project that I conceived of and played with when I started my art practice in the summer of 2023, one that dealt with resolution and scale. I was only a few weeks into my art journey, and I was super excited about what to learn or work on next.
I started listening to the audio book "The War of Art" by Stephen Pressfield. That book got me fired up and into action, and gave me the courage to explore an idea that had been forming in my mind.
My idea was to play with the concepts of resolution and scale in the context of pointillism, which is the phenomenon where if you place unblended dots of color next to each other, the eye will blend them together into another color. We've all seen this in newspaper print images that have been blown up to the point where you can see the individual dots that make up an image.
To start this project, I bought a bag of 10,000 colored paper squares. Each piece is 3/8” x 3/8” and is one of 13 colors (actually 11 "candy" colors along with black and white).
The two concepts that control how that will come out are resolution, the size of the individual paper squares (3/8") and scale, the size of the overall piece. In this project, I explored the balance between those two, trying to find the right balance between them. My goal was for the piece to be a little difficult to resolve for a moment, then your brain figures it out, resulting in a pop of delight.
Due to the low resolution, I had to use a universally known image like the Mona Lisa to guarantee that most people would recognize what they’re looking at, just because they've seen this piece so many times.
My pixel size and palette were fixed, based on the fact that I was working with 3/8” squares of paper, with 13 different (mostly bright) colors. The relatively low number of colors available and the relatively large granularity of the pixels means that this kind of artwork has to be large enough for the eye to see the forest and not the trees. (Well, I guess you see the trees for a few seconds, then the forest becomes apparent.)
I settled on 18” x 24” being the smallest size that could be visually understood, while staying small enough for this beginner to work on. I used Photoshop to reduce the image size to 64 x 43 pixels, which is very low resolution. I then switch to indexed color, using a color table consisting of the 13 color values in my paper square “palette”.
This idea could be used to create much larger works of art more convincingly. I’m talking mural size.
For example, here’s a continuous tone JPG image of a butterfly, shown at its original size and color depth.
If I don’t reduce the image size but do switch to indexed mode with the 13-color palette, the image is still quite recognizable. There’s color banding, but that’s ok, we’re not necessarily going for hyperrealism here.
This works to fool the eye because Photoshop uses dithering to create the illusion of a larger color palette by arranging pixels from the limited palette in a way that fools the eye.
So while that butterfly image is recognizable even with the limited color palette, it would only be so at this large image size (2340 x 1560). With each pixel being 3/8”, that image would have to be over 73 feet wide and over 48 feet tall, and would require 3,650,400 squares of paper, which would require over 365 bags (probably way more than that, because only some of the colors in each bag get used).
So while that’s a bit larger than I could take on myself, something like that could be a fun community project, if I could find colored pixel materials that were relatively inexpensive and would stand up to the elements and time. A paper mural would have to live indoors. Interesting to think about for the future.
To make my pointiliist Mona Lisa, I took an original photo of this piece and transformed it in Photoshop as described above, reducing it in resolution and in palette. Here is the result of that.
I realized that with around 2500 paper "pixels", I would require a ton of glue to adhere these. So to make this easier, I went to my local hardware store and bought a polypropylene panel as the substrate and some double-sided carpet tape as the adhesive. I started at the top left, laying down one horizontal strip of carpet tape on the panel, then one by one, pressed each of the 2,752 pieces of paper down into the tape.
This process took 3 days, during which time I listened to "The War of Art" twice, back to back. That book really set me up for success from the very beginning!
Here are some photos showing the result...
In this first image, we're up close to the piece. At this level, it's difficult to resolve the image because the pixel resolution is large relative to the overall size of the piece and how close we are to it.
Next, we move a little further away from the piece.
As we continue moving away from the piece, it gets clearer.
It becomes easier for your eye to resolve the image as you get further away, because the pixel resolution is now smaller than before, simply because you're further away! Pretty cool, huh?
