Digital creation of Chuck Close block-style portraits using wavelet filters
Edward Aboufadel, Sarah Boyenger, Clara Madsen · Journal of Mathematics and the Arts · 2010
Chuck Close is an American artist who paints large ‘block portraits,’ which are a type of mosaic where the tiles are small rotated squares which contain abstract shapes. Despite the drastic change in fine details compared to a photograph, all of the abstract marks work together to create a realistic looking portrait. There is a certain duality: viewed up close, the paintings are flat and obscured, but from afar they seem to pop out into three dimensions. This article presents a new method to digitally create portraits in the block style of Chuck Close. The work described in this article is novel in three ways: (1) wavelets filters are used to determine the shapes in the marks, (2) the colour-picking algorithm leads to a more natural colouring than previous work in this area and (3) tiles other than squares are used.