In the portrait series you will experiment with techniques in Photoshop in order to represent a person. Through the manipulation of the image we can bring new meaning and see portraiture as something new and meaningful.

Many contemporary artists have experimented with the idea of the grid as the underlying structure of painting and computer graphics. Chuck Close is a New York artist who was a traditional painter whose work gradually became overtaken by the use of the grid. You can see above in the examples how the structure of the painting works.

Long before computers were capable of displaying colors or even shades of gray, computer programers were printing images made of strings of letters and numbers. Known as ASCII Art, the technique was laborious to program: but the results were often spectacular. In your first portrait experiment you will use the technique of the ASCII artists in a new manner. Follow the instructions below to complete the first tutorial.

1. Open the preferences dialog box in Photoshop., go to Guides, Grid and Slices section. Set up grid lines with the spacing you need for the size of the job. Here, we are using a 12 pixel grid.
1. Make sure the grid is visible (use view>show> Grid) and create a new text box; type in a random string of ones and zeros. Adjust the size and leading until the numbers fit within the grid.
2. Turn that text box into pixels using Layer>Rasterize >type, then duplicate the block of text so it fills the entire cans area, merge all the raster type layers together to create a single layer.
3. Inverse the type layer to make whit eon black text, then open the Hue /saturation dialog. Check the colorize button and lower the brightness value, drag the hue slider to get the color you want.
4. Now for the photograph. It helps to choose an image with strong light and shade; increase the contrast if you need to . Erase an fiddly elements in the background so that the foreground image stands out.
1. To treat the image to match the grid, choose Filter>Pixelate>Mosiac. This turns the image into an array of large , square pixels. A cell size of 12 will make the squares match the grid exactly.
2. For a more graphic effect, use Image>Adjustments> Posterize. This process reduces the number of gray shades in the image: a value of 4 produces good results.
3. Now we’ll make the numbers show through. From the pop up menu in the layers palette, change the mode of the layer from Normal to Multiply: now we an see through the image to the numbers below.
4. Zooming in on the image shows us how the Mosaic effect and the grid coincide perfectly. Each number is an entire unit-there are no cutoff portions of numbers in the entire image.
5. If you want some of the numbers to be visible n the background, open the Levels adjustment (ctrl L) and drag the bottom left slider to the right to brighten the darker areas.

PORTRAIT SERIES