Have you ever felt that there just isn’t enough crayon art in your home? The short answer is that you need to get out more. The longer answer is that Color. Works is here to turn your photographs into crayon dot masterworks.
The company creates large mosaics out of actual crayons mounted in made-to-order frames. You can send one of your own images or buy one from their selection of images.
The process itself is deceptively simple but time-consuming. When you upload an image to the site and pick your size it is converted into a highly pixelated form. Those pixels are then automatically assigned to corresponding colours from the 173 crayon types available.
/Color. Works
The interesting part of this process is that rather than machine press the art piece, Color. Works’ team will construct the artwork by hand. This is pretty astounding seeing as, depending on size the eventual image will be made of hundreds, if not thousands of individual crayons.
The final products gave us some weird flashbacks to Monkey Island as they bear a strong resemblance to the 8 and 16-bit games of the late 80’s and early 90’s. They are also reminiscent of another relic of that era – magic eye pictures, since up close they don’t really make much sense to look at. However, as photo reproduction goes, these works are (in keeping with the theme) totally rad.
Of course we had to try it out but since it was Friday morning in the office, we’d run out of coffee, and everyone wanted to wallow in their misery, I took a selfie of my majestic visage.
Yes yes, it's beyond any beauty you have ever known but keep reading.
After cropping the picture to one of their 7 available ratios and choosing a large size, I put it through the crayonifying process to see the result. Six minutes and 9600 crayon colours later and voila, c’est magnifique.
Far out home slice /Color. Works
Well, not really. The process is fun but you’re really going to want an image with a larger range of colour to end up with an artwork that looks top-notch. Of course, Color. Works don’t come cheap. To give you an idea of pricing, that simple selfie would cost US$2,189.
This is a neat idea, if a strange one to base a whole company around, but but the Color. Works site is fun to check out. You can find out more about the company here, but if you do decide to invest in one of these works, keep it well clear of children.
Also fire. Fire bad.
. digitalrev.com2016-10-7 03:00