She’s quite a lot more impressive in person.
This is a collaborative project I started with my dad, who actually encourages his children to draw on the walls. The finished project takes up most of one wall in his living room, and was done with interior house paint. It’s about 5 ft x 4ft, consisting of over 5,000 1 inch squares. Surprisingly, this only took about a month – start to finish – to complete.
I started off with, of course, the highest resolution photo I could find of our lady. The aspect ratio didn’t work, so I had to crop it to match the wall. We’d already decided that we wanted a mosaic, and that we didn’t want a full color one. I changed the photo to grayscale, and spent a while playing with Photoshop’s mosaic filter. I was aiming to get the squares as large as possible while keeping the image recognizable. Then came the tedious part of this project. I used this Photoshop file and an Excel spreadsheet to map out the black values (the percentage of black) in each square. We planned to use 10 shades, so I rounded, and ended up with over 5,000 squares marked with a value from 1 through 10. Now, we had a pattern.
Using an enormous ruler and most of our free time, we transferred the pattern onto the living room wall. What we basically ended up with was a huge paint by numbers. We mixed up our 10 shades, using different amounts of the light and dark pink, and then had a painting party. The fun thing about this project was that once the pattern was finished, everyone could help paint.
I’ve had quite a few people ask me where I got the pattern for this. I still have the spreadsheet pattern, if anyone is interested in making one of their own. Just be sure to send me a photo when it’s finished!
