It's almost too crazy to believe. Artist Nikki Douthwaite collects unwanted paper – hole-punch dots – sorts them by color and then painstakingly arranges them using a pair of tweezers into incredible portraits. Over the past three years she's created these modern pointillism portraits of some very famous celebrities. John Lennon and Marilyn Monroe are each composed of 99,000 hole-punch dots, whereas Jimi Hendrix is made up of an astounding 150,000.
If you thought there must be some shortcuts, there isn't. In fact, on her Facebook page she humorously states that she creates “art work that takes ages and will hurt your eyes.” She told NBCNews.com, “The idea to use hole-punch dots came from studying pointalist artist (Georges) Seurat for my degree. I don't really have a trick, just hard work and an obsession. Tweezering one dot on at a time and making sure the color mix is right before I start. I will often stick my hand in a bucket of 30,000 hole-punch dots and say, ‘That needs more light purple.'”
The artist holds a Guinness World Record for the biggest number of dots ever used in a picture. “‘My goal is to create two experiences for the viewer,” she told Metro. “The first is a close up experience of either thousands of tiny, mixed up coloured dots, which in detail intrigue in themselves, but may seem chaotic and to have no order to the viewer at this distance. The second experience is the far away view, the viewers' eyes and brain mix the dots and colours together, revealing the relationships of the details and the image as a whole.”
If you'd like to see these stunning works up close, Williams is showcasing some of them at the McLaren Technology Centre in January 2013.
