Monday, December 05, 2011

A New Meaning to Pointillist Art...

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

AWESOME THING OF THE DAY: Candy Sprinkles Photography
November 30, 2011

This "photograph" isn't a photograph: it's actually a painstakingly created piece of pointillist artwork. And it's made of candy.

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We spoke to Joel Brochu, the Canadian artist and student at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan who created this brilliant piece of candy art. It took him a long time - Joel spent nearly eight months placing 221,184 nonpareils sprinkles (circular candy sprinkles that are used in cake and doughnut decoration) on a four foot by 1.5 foot board using double-sided tape.

Joel didn't actually take the photograph the artwork is based on: "The photograph from which I worked was taken by Shingo Uchiyama, a Japanese photographer. I stumbled on his work when searching for the perfect image to use and absolutely fell in love with his beagle. He granted me permission to use it."

In order to go from photograph to candy mosaic, Joel ran the original pic through a computer program that breaks down images into essential colours. According to the artist, "the difficult part was matching the computer colours to the actual colours of the nonpareils", which is not surprising, since he only had six colours of candy to work with. That's right: the artwork only contains six colours. The photorealistic effect is achieved by visual colour blending when it's viewed from a distance.

And as if all that wasn't impressive enough, how about this? Joel's not even majoring in fine arts. He told us he was studying art for a few months, but decided to make a change: "I have settled on religion and Eastern philosophy, another interest I have had since childhood". It seems he's already stumbled on an effective form of meditation.

Here are some close-ups that reveal the details of Joel's work of art.

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