Pixel by Pixel - Week 01
February 04, 2021
Pixilation Project
First Attempt
In my first attempt at this project, I had the idea to build an attachment to my camera that would pixilate my image without any technology. I was a bit nervous about whether this would work because it was reminiscent of the Subway Board pixilation shown in class. The difference, though, is that light was emitted from the board, whereas in this case, the light would be passing through the grid into the camera.
I tried a couple of things to build it at first, but it was tough to get the size right. So, I decided to 3D print a basic block with a “line infill” but stop the print before it finished. then I’d just cut off the back. As shown here
The, I was able to mount a small diffusion sheet over the lattice, so it looked like this:
Once that was done, I mounted it, but it did not quite work. It really just blurred me out or focused on the actual lattices (I have no way to set up a manual focus on this webcam).
Second Attempt
This came to me while I was eating Pez. I realized that, in some ways, they are a smidge like pixels, so I figured why not make something out of them. I wanted something similar to a mosaic.
MeeNa Ko, a friend of mine who is also a first year, is a phenomenal pixel artist. I asked them if they had any sunrises laying around. They didn’t, but out of the purity of their amazing heart they made the following 24 x 24 image based on the colors I had available to me:
After this, I bought an ungodly volume of Pez.
From here, I pulled up the reference and got to work laying down the Pez.
At a certain point, I realized that I did not have nearly enough Pez and also, grape Pez is not actually purple. It is pink, like the strawberry and cherry flavors, so I had to come up with a different idea for the water. Then I found this bad boy:
From here, I added the Nerds as the ocean and finished the piece. Like so:
It is hard to capture with images, but from certain distances and angles, it really does read as a sunrise. My roommate knew what it was immediately and the less you look directly at it, the more realistic it appears. To me, this indicates that it is doing the job as intended by pixilation.
Written by Philip Cadoux, current ITP student and Creative Technologist. Follow me on Instagram