Turn Paint Chips Into Pixelated Artwork – Art – Lifehacker

By Jason Fitzpatrick,

4:00 PM on Sat Oct 3 2009,

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Creating some pixel-based art doesn’t have to involve tediously drawing and painting in hundreds of squares. Use this simple technique and you can create your own pixel art in an afternoon and without any paint drips on your floor.

The secret sauce in this DIY project? Paint sample chips—lots and lots of paint sample chips. You’ll need to run a raid on your local big-box hardware store and round up some sample chips.

You’ll need a source image, an image editor—we recommend checking out the Hive Five about image editors if you need one—and of course a razor to cut the paint chips up. From there all you need to do is toy with the resolution of the image in your image editor to pixelize it and then transfer it, paint chip-by-paint chip, onto your wall.

How many colors and how many pixels you want to use is limited by your patience and whether or not you get kicked out of Home Depot before filling your entire shopping cart with paint chips.

Not sure how Home Depot or Lowes would feel about me snagging so many paint swatches to make art for my home, but I love the effect.