Saturday, November 17, 2007

167. Skull By Numbers

Paint By Numbers Illustration. You might get a bit of a surprise if you paint the picture*. Download a hi-res PDF HERE and have fun, (and of course send me a picture of the results!).

NOTE: You will have to mix your own colors, use the swatches at the bottom as a guide, but feel free to experiment with different palettes. I recommend acrylics or tempera, but anything opaque will work.

*If you're impatient you can cheat and see the end result HERE.

UPDATE: Since B.B.B. asked, the way I made this was to start with a photograph which I brought into Photoshop, I used the Cutout filter to reduce the number of colors and simplify the art. Then I brought the image into Illustrator where I traced each shape (and further reduced the numbers of colors), putting each color on its own layer. After adjusting the image in color, I changed all of the shapes to white with the blue outline and added the numbers, using the layers to help me keep them straight.



8 comments:

Daniel said...

i don't have any paints at the moment, but i did photoshop it to see what it would look like, was fun!

all colored in

mim said...

I hope that some of my color research class students see this post...they learned how to make what Alber's called the "chromatic grays," so this would be fun for them. I can't wait to try it myself, though I might like to use a palette by, hmmm, maybe Monet? Van Gogh?

Anonymous said...

Did it on the computer and couldn't tell anything about it until I happen to walk away from the screen and while walking back it hit me. THAT WAS AWESOME!!!! Great job!

Kim said...

Awesome! You used similar colours to the puppy/latch skull.

I don't have paint *or* photoshop. But I do have GIMP! :D

Anonymous said...

Argh! You got me! I'm a huge paint by numbers fan and totally thought I could 'see' it with my paint-by-numbers third eye. Coloured it in on photoshop (cheat cheat!) and couldn't understand what you had done 'wrong'...black beside black...surely not!

Right up until the last moment I was still looking for the two skulls...then it hit me!

LOVE this post and LOVE this site!! Keep up the amazing work!

B. Baltimore Brown said...

This is great. Would you care to share how you created the paint by number?

joshua christ said...

anyone else see the hidden skull? it's on the left side, little above center. was this intended? lol

Anonymous said...

This would be so cool as a multi-layer stencil/screenprint.