Knoxville Storm Water Management had its annual rain barrel painting contest in May of 2012. A friend who worked there encouraged me to make an entry. I decided to implement a variation of a trick I invented for a student project at SCAD. I processed photographs and other images in Photoshop and reduced the color palette to a handful of colors. It was a slow, tedious process. But the results were eye-popping! It was sold at the charity auction. But a few years later, it eventually ended up in my possession, where it has remained ever since.
This was the original design that wrapped around the rain barrel. Each pixel represented one square inch. Matching pixel colors with paint was very tricky. I limited my palette to just ten colors. Over the years, I’ve refined my color palette to match paint mixtures perfectly. And I’ve increased the number of colors I use by a factor of fifteen.
