Acrylic Halftone Paintings
 

I took home an old overhead projector from work, and decided to see if I could do something artistic with it. This was the first project that popped into my head, and I'm tickled to death with the results.

I bought some canvases at Wal Mart ($5 for three 16 x 20...what a deal!) and some round sponge brushes, and 99 cent bottles of cyan and black.

I took two pictures (one of me, one of my fiance) and cropped them down in photoshop to just the eyes, set the mode to CMYK, and had it halftone the pictures with .75" as the maximum dot size. I printed the black and cyan channels on transparencies (along with some alignment marks) and set up my projector and easel.

First I laid down the black, let it dry, and then laid down the blue, watered down enough to let the black show through.

Here's two zoomed in squares, one from each painting, to get an idea of what they look like up close...these are roughly lifesize on my screen, the big dots are about three quarters of an inch:

http://lh6.google.com/image/themarti...ebbie-zoom.jpg

http://lh3.google.com/image/themarti...artin-zoom.jpg

And here's larger images of the finished product.

http://lh4.google.com/image/themarti...800/martin.jpg

http://lh5.google.com/image/themarti...800/debbie.jpg

The beauty of these is you have to view them from far away for them to 'turn into' anything...try getting as far away from your monitor as you can. If you can't because your against a wall (or are lazy, hehe) here's some thumbnails to simulate the effect:
http://lh4.google.com/image/themarti...144/martin.jpg http://lh5.google.com/image/themarti...144/debbie.jpg
This was my first venture into non-digital art in probably ten years, and I absolutely love it! :thumbsup: If anyone is interested in more complete instructions on what I did, I'll happily post an expanded tutorial. Otherwise, thanks for endulging me!

That's pretty cool!

This is pretty cool! Lemme know if you get bored and want another picture to do :D Looks a lot more fun than drawing Pinecones.

Ee! I want to try that... where to get my hands on a projector.....
Those are amazing, twistedmosiac. Great job. :)

It seems imageshack has pooped out on me, as my images are red x'ed...I edited the OP to switch to picasa for hosting. Thanks for the kind words, everyone! Amonkie, you should try it yourself!

twistedmosaic, well done and much appreciated.

Art

how big are these? these make me think of Chuck Close's work!

Love it!

Chuck Close meets Roy Lichtenstein.
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Question - how do you make PS halftone something? (on PC)

these look very similar to Rasterbator images. but ya, if you want to make some in PHOTOSHOP, check filters > sketch > halftone paterns... but remember that the colours you have in your foreground/background will be the colours used i think.

I'm sure there are several ways of doing this. Here's how I did it:

Take your picture, and crop a portion the same aspect ratio as your canvas (you can change your rectangle select to 'fixed aspect ratio' and, in this case, make it 20 x 16)

http://lh4.google.com/image/themarti...ittentone1.jpg

Resize the image to the size of your canvas at 100dpi (so, 2000 x 1600, for me)

http://lh3.google.com/image/themarti...ittentone2.jpg

Change the image mode from RGB color to CMYK color. That is in the Image->Mode menu. If you don't do that, the next steps won't work right.

I couldn't get a screenshot of the halftone menu for some reason, but it is under Filter -> Pixelate -> Color Halftone...

You can play with any of these settings you want, but to get the effect I got, try your Max Radius at 50 pixels (half an inch, at 100 pixels per inch).

This should be the result:
http://lh3.google.com/image/themarti...ittentone3.jpg

To print your individual colors (and to decide which channels you want to paint) go to the Channels pallet...if it isn't showing, show it with your Windows menu. Hide one or more of the channels. Through trial and error, I determined that trying to do all four channels is too busy...it is nearly impossible to get multiple colors to mix evenly. The best effects I could get were using black and one channel of color, like this:

http://lh5.google.com/image/themarti...ittentone4.jpg

Once you get something you like, hide all the channels except one, print it on transparency, then hide all the channels except your other one, and print it, too. Figure out a way to line them up, overlay them one at a time pointed at your canvas, and paint on!

They are 16" x 20", or 40cm x 50cm, depending on your units :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

Cool pointelism! Thanks for sharing....you're sorta a modern day Seurat!

Thanks for posting your work, twistedmosaic - it's been a while since we've seen something as original as that around here.

The result is quite amazing to say the least so I think I'll give it a try myself at some point :crazy:

Very cool!

I've been using an opaque projector for some recent work, and this definitely has me wanting to more fully integrate my oils and digital work.

I really enjoy that this has an obviously digital/photographic quality as a whole, but when viewed at close range shows the artist's hand, if you will. I would be interested to see if that could either be pushed to the extreme (a sort of digital impressionism hybrid) or eliminated entirely (to make a very impersonal, mechanical piece with mostly analog processes). Once again, very cool! (and quite thought provoking)

Woah! alright!

thats VERY cool stuff. How'd this neat idea pop into your head anyway? i really like how it turned out. Your avatar doesnt do too much justice to their larger counter parts.

i centered the larger ones on the screen, walked across the room like suggested, and stared for a bit. it would be pretty bad ass to have something like that on my wall.