Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nWwCt4vjYY&playnext=1&list=PL313E5B606D57C3FD

I was debating posting this, but it's such a unique method of creating artwork that some of you ought to find it interesting.

Thousands of crayons are stacked such that the tip of each crayon equals one pixel of color information. The art is the physical crayon. A customized computer program examines each bit of pixel information and assigns a crayon color to it. It's essentially a crayon-by-number approach. It probably wouldn't be too hard to write a program to determine the color of each pixel in a photograph and assign the color to a matching crayon (Wikipedia has the RGB numbers for all of Crayola's current crayons).

I was half interested in figuring out how to do this and then looked at how many crayons would be embedded in the artwork. I just did a measurement and 100 crayons side-to-side is about a yard long. That means that it would require 15,000 crayons to replicate an image with a low resolution of 100x150 crayons. The cost of that many crayons is less than I expected. I just bought 120 crayons at Walmart for $6 which works out to a nickel a crayon. At that price, 15,000 crayons would cost $750. Buying crayons in bulk ought to be less than a retail package from Crayola and a cheaper brand would work just as well. I've got no idea how long it would take to put together such a painting, but the labor involved would be more expensive. On the plus side, the artist has sold every crayon work she's produced.

Switching topics a bit, a more traditional approach to crayon art is taken by artist Don Marco that elevates the lowly crayon to masterworks.
http://www.themastercrayonartist.com/shop/itemnfs.aspx?itemid=423

in the old days they were called "bitmaps". the apple colour picker includes crayons.  in case anybody asks.

Attached Link: http://www.christianfaur.com/crayons/TrueColors/image1.html

The above link is the artist's website. This link shows details of the image. I wonder if this kind of artwork would be improved by altering the lengths of the crayons to achieve a true 3D affect where curved surfaces would actually curve and the background would have the shortest sticks.  This image appears to be something less than 2500 crayons.

Did the apple color picker actually specify a Crayola color?

I know that Photoshop's color picker shows the numeric values of the colors. While not impossible, I'd hate to sample hundreds or thousands of pixes. That wouldn't require any specialized software.

I wonder how much the artist changed the colors. Shadows on the face are blues, greens, and purples instead of browns and dark reds.

Interesting work.

Before there were bitmaps, there was Pointilism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism

looking at the work, I wonder where the "Art" lies in the mind of the artist, is it in the finished objects or the algorithm he created to make the work?

art is the process by which various sentient organisms (humans, gorillas, dolphins, chimps, elephants et al.) create things, e.g. images.  in pointillism they were allowed to do small dashes or diags,  it was like sub-pixel rendering in that a particular dot could be a colour gradient due to the way a brush tip picks up pigments from a palette.

In a way, all 2D art is pointillism. Computer art is points of color information. A traditional painting is flecks of paint sticking to points of paper. Our eyes use a finite number of receptors such that our vision is the aggregate of all those points of information.

Tradtional pointillism is intentionally creating art by applying points rather than traditional lines.

The definitions blur with this example of using a computer to determine which color goes where. Instead of organically creating the Crayola image by individually placing the crayons to build the image from an outline and filling it in, it's more likely being created by unskilled laborers laying down the crayons from the bottom up based on a printout of the colors that need to be layed out in the frame. The computer created the art, not the person placing the crayons.

If there were a plastic lattice frame where crayons could be placed into predefined holes, it would be possible to create this kind of art without the aid of a computer. Trying to do it, without something to hold the individual crayons in place, would be physically more difficult. Anybody who has put all the crayons back in a box knows that the crayons don't line up parallel, so it takes some fiddling to get them all to line up together to fit well in the box. It wouldn't be impossible, but then it's a matter of fighting with the medium.