I made this as a Christmas present for my girlfriend. It worked out pretty ok, I think.
The idea is from Petros Vrellis, a Greek artist who makes these kind of things. I consulted with him for advice and he was supercool and helpful. I used a Processing program called "weaver". The algorithm is awesome: • Take an image file and place a circle of pins (points) around it. • Start at pin 0. • Scan all lines across the picture from 0 to all other pins (180 pins in mine, Petros uses 300) and assign a value for the total darkness of the pixels along that line. • Choose the line with the greatest darkness value and draw it. • On the image file, lighten the pixels on that line by x%. • Repeat starting with the new endpoint. • Continue for as many lines as necessary to get a good picture, around 3000. That's it. Just by drawing and removing the darkest line over and over again, you get a result that looks like a photo. The program outputs a text file with a list of the points. It's then just a matter of threading 0 to 74 to 4 to 73 to 3 to 69 to 10 to 175 to 101 to...
That's such a cool way to do that! I wonder if you could reduce the number of loops (and thus lines) by minimizing the difference in grey values instead of maximizing total darkness? (P.S.: I call dibs on Maximize Total Darkness for my heavy metal band name.)