Grid Art "Sunburst Daisy"

The choice for my Grid Art project was one that took lots of research. Originally I really wanted to go with something luminicent. Unfortunately my options of glowsticks or glowing fluid in cups were both too expensive for a broke college student (upwards of $300), as well as my idea for individually powered and assembled LED diodes (upwards of $500). So I decided to go with something that I could do for almost free. Paper...

Paper is a resource I can get for free from Reslife as I am an RA, and Painters Tape came with it. I decided to recreate a digital image with "pixels" of paper. I chose my favorite modern artist, one who inspired me to pursue 3D Digital Art, Ryan Bliss, founder and sole contributor to Digital Blasphemy.

Now it was time to select an image. My original intent was to use one of my favorite images "Dispersion", however after reducing the image size in Photoshop, you could not define the containers of fluid. Therefore I decided to use a more abstract image, "Sunburst Daisy". I love this piece for the vibrant color and transparency illusion. After reducing the image size, I could clearly note where the image came from, and I had a winner.

Next step was to reduce the number of colors in the image. I set the image mode to index to specify the exact number of colors in the image to twenty. From there I manually brought it down to 15 in order to preserve the colors I deemed important. Unfortunately there were a few colors I was missing, so being a poor college student I biked nine miles to Michaels to buy colored paper. After a long bike ride, complicated by my pedal spontaneously falling off I arrived to find that they did not have the colors I needed, so I sacrificed two more colors, one of which was disappointing to me very much as it was the dark teal on the outer rim of the flower.

Regardless, I started the tedious process of cutting the paper into 1x1 inch squares. 2,610+ (there were lots of extras) squares later I was ready to start taping them to the wall. And so began a loooooooooooong process of taping the pieces to my wall. I started putting them on butch paper attached to my wall, but after failing to get the paper to hold, I simply taped the squares to the wall. After spending my "free time" for a week on putting these pieces up, I finished on 3/9/13 at 8:30PM, signed the last square and stuck it up. But my journey wasn't over just yet, there were still two things to take care of.

I took a few pictures of the work and pulled it into Photoshop and flipped it horizontally, then the whole piece vertically. While the quarter image can stand on its own, I wanted to see how it would look pieced together as I intended, it is fairly symmetrical, and I figured this would work "good enough". It came out fantastic as you will see below.

Finally, I had an epiphany after completing the project. A way to make the piece glow as I originally intended. Using a black light, I was able to illuminate the more vibrant colors.

Click Here to see a video I made to demonstrate my process. Please forgive the crude, unscripted nature of the video. I hadn't slept in days because I had to finish the project before the resource room closed for spring break, I was pulling all-nighters all week to finish and had no time for that :D