EXCEL ART
Richard was inspired to see what Excel could do with regards to creating images, so set out to see what was possible. He created a grid of very small cells, and coloured them all in, so that when zoomed out it produced an image! A mosaic effect, similar to ‘colour-by-number’ in a grid.
These cells were not coloured by hand, but rather using maths to find the closest colour and to fill in the cells. The image shown below is 750 cells wide by 450 cells high.
Here is the original photograph, which is needed to determine the colours. 750 pixels wide by 450 pixels high.
We determine the colours for each pixel, and then use formulas to convert them to combine certain colours, as Excel can not handle the full range of colour options.
This is a photo of Richard & Wendy, the husband and wife team behind Spreadsheet Solutions.
This is the image created using Excel! As you can see, it’s more ‘pixelated’ because of the colour combinations, but a close match!
We experimented with grey-scale, which was far clearer as there are fewer grey colours. We also experimented with using dots instead of full cells, which was interesting.
It’s amazing what you can do with Excel when you play around.
We don’t necessarily make these images to sell, but we do occasionally have people requesting them as they are quite unique. If you would like us to make you a custom image, please get in touch.
We have a few options, which we can tell you about, but the main option (as pictured) will cost £75 and will be sent to you in a spreadsheet rather than a JPEG file. The other options are all JPEGs and will cost less.