Painting by numbers

I wanted to share with you all a project I completed some time ago with my 14 year old cousin for her IY8 (Inspire Year 8 assignment).  She had to choose a mentor as such and work with that person for a period of ten hours on it.  The options were endless really, from designing a website to hosting a dinner party!  As long as the student adequately used and documented the hours spent. 

Our project was a portrait of my baby boy.  It now hangs on the wall in his bedroom.

We used a photo that we loved and played with it on the computer to make it black and white, enlarge it to the size of our canvas and grid it up (that is the technical term for it!)

So when we printed it off (on four pieces of A4 paper) it looked like this

We gave each square from top to bottom a letter and numbered along the bottom.  Then we drew a grid on our canvas with the same amount of squares (this part was not fun) and numbered them also.

We started with the black squares firstly then progressively got lighter.

We tried using a template to paint the tiny squares but found it easier to just do it freehand.  Having the graph made it easier initially to make sure we were painting the right squares.

This project was very time consuming and a tad frustrating but overall well worth it.

I love the finished product and I recon it will hang on our walls for many many years to come!  Oh and my cousin got top marks for her project = win win!