A while ago, I saw that someone did a pixelated portrait of Abraham Lincoln and I loved it! I had it in the back of my mind that I would copy it. I liked the idea of encountering Honest Abe here and there. I actually bought a long skinny canvas to copy what I had seen.
Earlier this week, however, I was looking around at different photographs of the Presidents. Actually, after watching a documentary on Jimmy Carter, I thought that I wanted to do a pixelated portrait of him doing Habitat for Humanity work. However, the pictures that I came across weren’t great for the task. Then I thought, who is a nice recognizable President with strong lines. Yes, it’s true, I have thoughts like that one. None other than the original Rough Rider himself came to mind.
So, this is the picture that I decided to work with:
The first step was to pixelate the image.
So, then I counted the pixels to figure out what kind of canvas would work best. I wound up working with a 22X28 canvas.
Then I drew the grid on the canvas. The long metal ruler that I purchased for sewing-related projects came in handy here!
Then I decided that I was going to use 6 shades of gray to created the image. I hadn’t read the article that went with the Abe image that inspired me, so I hadn’t realized that I could have told Photoshop Elements how many “colors” I wanted to use. I did the next best thing. Basically I assigned each color of gray that I would be using a number and then numbered the squares appropriately essentially creating a paint-by-numbers.
Then, I mixed the paint (gotta love empty yogurt containers) and started filling in the portrait color-by-color.
It was pretty exciting to see it take shape. By this point, I had to erase the gridlines from the parts of the portrait that were to remain white. Luckily I had a virgin white eraser (that sounds so, so very wrong, but not quite wrong enough to make me edit out that line) and carefully erased the grids. I got rid of the eraser shavings using a can of compressed air. Finally, I painted over the hitherto unpainted squares. I debated between using white and using a very light gray. I went with the gray which will give the finished painting a bit of contrast against even a white wall.
There he is!
And for the sake of comparison:
