essential pepper: alan rickman

Stick with this, it's a long, convoluted story.

Months ago, I had the compulsion to paint a portrait. Now it may seem like nothing to you but I have never painted before, oh sure, I've painted the walls, ceilings, tables, chairs but never a portrait. I am not an artist. Period. I'm not sure how or why this compulsion took over but it did and I had to get rid of it.

Not being one to do things in a small way I proceeded to purchase a 2x4 canvas (yes that is in feet people not inches) a paint brush, a ruler, and three acrylic tubes of paint in white, grey and black.

See, I had this idea of painting a pixelated portrait.

I took one of my favorite pictures and opened it up in PSP8 (yep I am the only one left in the world that doesn't have Photoshop). This is what I did:

Changed the portrait into gray-scale
Reduced the number of colours to 8 (I'm sure I could have increased the colours but as it turns out 8 was perfect. I'm not so sure my sanity could have handled all that grey). That still gave me a number of colours I could handle without losing details in the portrait.
I took the canvas and divided it into 1x1 inch squares...just because I thought 1 inch squares would still give me lots of detail or just because I'm nuts. If you are the anal kind this gave me a total of 1152 crazy little squares to paint. If I only did the calculations at the time I would have never even began the project but hey it was a compulsion so I wasn't thinking.

Once those crazy little squares were drawn I decided to paint the darkest colours first through to the lightest one.

You may have noticed that I purchased only 3 different colours....yes that meant I also had to mix my own colours to match those on my computer.

Then the rest is easy...colour by numbers right? Not so much. If you look near the top of the post I did mention I was not an artist right? Well I had never handled a teeny tiny brush before, not to mention mixing my own paint colours and trying to paint perfect squares.....BY HAND!

This is a pic of the first 4 colours. It looked mottled as the paint was not completely dry when I took picture.

I stopped trying to paint perfect squares early on. I decided that since Severus, Alan, and I were not perfect, then it wouldn't matter to any of us if the squares were perfectly well .... square. (and NO I refused to use painters tape for this...somehow it seemed like cheating, besides I hate taping).

This looks pretty sad with only 4 colours. I told you I can't paint perfect squares!

More colours and my square making has improved...a little.

5 colours.

6 colours. He looks really ugly here. By this step, I hated all things gray.

7 colours

All 8 freaking colours! Finito! I did refinish some of the black which was the first colour down. So again I was impatient and didn't wait for the painting to dry to take the picture.