Miss Frida, The Portrait

For the past couple of weeks I've been working on a mosaic of Miss Frida. It started with a photo of her, enlarged to letter size, and printed out in grayscale. Then, I went through a stack of magazines, searching for the right colors. Once I found them, I cut the preferred colors into tiny squares. With my big pile of colored mosaic squares, I was able to finally begin work on Frida's mosaic portrait.

For reference, I printed out a second photo (same size) to use while working on the mosaic. This was necessary because, once the mosaic squares begin to cover the page, I needed a photo to refer to--to see where shadows fell, the pattern of her spots, etc.

The result was this very "rough" portrait of Frida. Now that I have this much done, I'll apply some oil pastels to soften the image a bit. It'll be interesting to see what she looks like when I'm finally done!