Omaha artist, Scott Blake has been creating mosaic artwork for years, I’ve even written about his Barcode Mosaics in the past. His latest project however, is a lot more hands on…well, thumbs on to be exact.
Blake was recently invited as a visiting artist at a local elementary school to share his artwork and process. After showcasing some of his most famous work, like his Marilyn Monroe Barcode Mosaic , he gave each student the opportunity to create their very own mosaic portrait that is uniquely theirs, not only because they made one of kind self portrait of themselves, but they used their own unique thumbprint as their paintbrush.
Prior to his visit, each student submitted a photo of themselves to Blake who then created a pixelated version of their image. Next, he replaced each pixel with a letter representing the color of that pixel, so a red pixel is replaced with an “r” and so on. The lettered grid is then printed out as a poster for the student to paint on.
Students set up their art stations around the school and began to use their thumbs to mark each letter with the color it represents, resulting in an awesome mosaic portrait made of their very own thumbprints!
The end result is reminiscent of famous photo realist portrait painter, Chuck Close, but the process definitely falls in line with the photo mosaic art!
If you are interested in creating your very own thumbprint portrait, you can order your pixel grid here.
Source: Barcode Art
