Pixelated Picture From Recycled Paint Tester Pots

This wall art is a pixelated painting of my son made from recycled paint tester pots.

Lucky me !  A friend of mine recently gave me a big box of the teeny paint sample tins from her house renovation.  Her house is amazing, and would give anyone serious house envy.......

Even more lucky me that she had lots of indecision on paint colours (and taste in expensive paints),  so I will have to content myself with 25ml samples of her life for now.

Moving my jealousy aside, I deliberated over what to do with these for ages. Then I stumbled on to this picture on Houzz.

It is amazing.  Unfortunately I cant find details of the artist anywhere.  The interior designer is Marcelo Brito.

The colours are amazing, though they dont match the colours that I have to use up, and its more detailed / pixelated than I want....I think something like that would take me 6+ months....but I could definitely do a simple pixelated / mosaic theme with the colours I have in a more family friendly time frame.

This project is very time consuming, but doesn't really require much painting ability...just an ability to roughly match the colours, and fill in the squares.


You will need:


Large piece of canvas.   (Obv any painting surface / size is fine if scaleable from your original)
I used pre primed rolled, as I wanted a specific size.  I usually use the ready mounted canvases, as I can buy them cheaply, but I wanted this to be an exact size.

Pencil, tape measure/ruler, paint brushes
Various paint colours
Photo editing software, and printer.


1. First I chose a "face" picture, by cropping one of my existing photos.  I've done portraits of Abbi before, so thought I would give my sons photo a go (he is a little less willing as a model).

2.  Next I "pixelated" the picture using photo editing software.  I use Pixelmator.  The level of pixelation will be dictated depending upon how detailed / abstract you want your picture to be.

3.  Print out the picture, and create a grid system, so that each square on the page has a grid reference.  this isnt essential, but helps you to not lose track when you are working up close on the bigger picture.  My picture ended up with 21 squares horizontally (A-U), and 29 squares vertically.

4.  The next stage is to "scale up"   I wanted my picture to be about 1m wide, so I set my larger squares at 4cm each.

n.b.  If you are using unmounted canvas, dont forget to leave plenty of room as a margin to wrap your canvas onto stretcher bars.

5.  Next I marked our the grid on the large picture in pencil.  These marks will be covered up by the paint.

6.  Once I had my grid, I painted round the outside to the edges of my canvas in black (my border).   this is the colour that will show on the edges of the canvas when it is hung. I always do this on rolls of canvas, as its much easier before the picture is wrapped.

7. Finally before I started painting, I put masking tape over this black border, and marked the grid letters/numbers on the tape.  This saves lots of time counting and recounting squares, and less chance of filling the wrong colour in the square.

8.  Next its the fairly laborious task of filling in the squares to match your pixelated photo.  I found I needed two coats at least to give the opacity that was needed.

Unfortunately I didnt take any photos of these stages.....but the instructions are pretty self explanatory without any visuals.

Zooming in, give a more abstract feel

And zooming in even closer....

As you can see, my lines a fairly loose/ inaccurate, but it adds to the home made charm (right?)

I lost count of the number of hours spent on this project.  But I am really happy with the way it turned out....and my son (rather grudgingly) has even admitted he likes it.



Note:
I had lots of "neutrals" to use up, none were completely right for my squares, so I had to do a lot of mixing.  the mix dried quite quickly, so it was difficult to get lots of continuity.  It would be simpler to work with a pre defined smaller palette of colours, and stick to that, and would look more pop art-ish

Here is a great example of the paint tins being used

This was a large Art instalation by Resene in NZ as part of art week 2012.
More information here.

I may try other photo effect pictures.

If I ever get round to making these (highly unlikely),  I will post the details.