He's more Prickasso than Picasso but it hasn’t stopped Eric Daigh from selling his art for a small fortune.
The artist creates incredibly life-like portraits using coloured pins from noticeboards, and has sold some for thousands of pounds.
The 32-year-old uses only five colours in each picture and it can take him up to eight months to put one together. His biggest portraits are almost 2m high (6ft 6in) and use more than 20,000 pins.
‘Millions of people use them daily but nobody had stumbled upon this before me,’ said Mr Daigh, who holds the Guinness World Record for the biggest push pin mosaic.
How I got as far as getting the first one done is some alchemy of divorce, boredom and idiocy. But after that it was easy.’
Mr Daigh, from Michigan, US, buys the pins in batches of between 75,000 and 100,000.
He said: ‘I worked as a video editor before doing this and it was addictive to have people look at my work and say, “That must have taken for ever” rather than “That took all that time?”.’
Push pin mosaic portraits by Eric Daigh
The artist creates incredibly life-like portraits using coloured pins from noticeboards, and has sold some for thousands of pounds.
The 32-year-old uses only five colours in each picture and it can take him up to eight months to put one together. His biggest portraits are almost 2m high (6ft 6in) and use more than 20,000 pins.
‘Millions of people use them daily but nobody had stumbled upon this before me,’ said Mr Daigh, who holds the Guinness World Record for the biggest push pin mosaic.
How I got as far as getting the first one done is some alchemy of divorce, boredom and idiocy. But after that it was easy.’
Mr Daigh, from Michigan, US, buys the pins in batches of between 75,000 and 100,000.
He said: ‘I worked as a video editor before doing this and it was addictive to have people look at my work and say, “That must have taken for ever” rather than “That took all that time?”.’
but on closer inspection, we can see that each portrait is made up of thousands of coloured pins
Artist Eric Daigh, who lives in northern Michigian in the USA, creates each portrait using thousands of pins pushed into a notice board
The 32-year-old, who holds the Guinness World Record for the biggest push pin mosaics, uses only five colours in each picture
Daigh's biggest portraits are almost 2 metres high (6ft 6in) and use more than 20,000 pins. They can take around eight months to complete
In the smaller portraits, it is easier to see that they are made of coloured pins
Daigh says his biggest influence was the artist Chuck Close, who created huge photorealistic portraits using an underlying grid, copying the source picture cell by cell
Daigh begins his portraits with a digital photograph of his subject. He then uses a computer to create a low-res five-colour image using the primary colours of red, blue and yellow, plus black and white
He then produces a grid map showing him where to stick the pins, row by row
“If I can do 1,000 pins a day, I’m pretty happy,” says Daigh