I knew at the outset of this project that it was going to be a massive undertaking. Consider it: take a selfie, reduce it down to a pixelated 5-color palette, print it out and recreate it by gluing skittles onto a sheet of card stock. Pixel by pixel. Skittle by skittle. Day after day. Week after week.
I made sure the youth knew how much work this was going to be, and they voted to do this project regardless. I want to make that clear! Only a monster would force someone into performing a task like this without prior consent. Just look at the smiling faces of Chris and Essence as they work:
Proof!
The operating concept is this: you reduce an image’s resolution by pixelating it.
Viewed up close, it doesn’t look all that much like the person it’s meant to depict.
Observed from a distance, however, and it looks less and less abstract.
The question then becomes where you draw the line. The larger the pixels, the smaller the final image and the fewer skittles it takes to complete it. The tradeoff, however, is how far one has to stand in order to tell who the skittle selfie is meant to depict.
The Media Team Youth each made this decision for themselves. And here they are in progress.
How much longer will this take, you ask?
