New Art Project!

I love making stuff, but with life always getting in the way it’s easy to let arts and crafts fall through the cracks. Recently during my East Coast drive-through, I stopped to visit SarahLyla in Philly. We saw a cool art exhibit which used nails on wood to create striking images of trees.

I decided that I wanted to try this. My artistic strengths are only mediocre though, so I am going to use technology to improve my results.

The Plan:

One of the few advantages of photoshop over MSPaint is a function called halftone. This function will convert a picture into a series of dots varying in size. My goal is to project this dotted image onto a board, and then use nails with various sized heads to duplicate the image.

My first attempt will be with this image:

Jimi Hendrix

That image is about 60 nails wide, and 50 nails tall, though I think I’ll leave out a vast majority of the tiny nails that make up the blackspace as 3000 nails begins to get pricey. This weekend I purchased nails with six different head sizes – from brad to roofing nail. Assuming about a 1/4 inch nail head allotment (giving the opportunity for some sweet overlap) my board image will be about 15 inches on the diagonal. Most of the nails are 1.5inches long. I’ve toyed with the idea of nailing the nails at different depths… but I think I’ll start off simple with a standardized depth.

Next weekend I hope to lay out the grid on the board and make a rudimentary nail-by-number off of the image. Awesome!

I will keep the blog updated on my progress!

*note: special thanks to Ryan Schenk for the photoshop assistance

3 thoughts on “New Art Project!

  • 12/13/2010 at 1:52 pm
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    Still not sure I understand this. Are some of the nails brighter than others, or do they just take up more of the space? Does a little nail, which appears darker, just allow more of the black background to show which makes it appear darker, or is it actually a darker nail?

    Reply
    • 12/13/2010 at 1:55 pm
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      All of the nails have the same brightness. So my picture will be based solely on size of the nail head.

      Reply
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