Canadian artist Bradley Hart creates pixelated photo-realistic images by injecting bubble wrap with acrylic paint. The process it’s considerably more complicated and time-consuming than it sounds, but the end result is simply mind-blowing.

Pixelated portraits are nothing new. In the years since I started Oddity Central I’ve seen this kind of artworks created with everything from thousands of lipsticks to colored crayons and keyboard keys, but I’ve never heard of anyone using bubble wraps. Until today, that is. Bradley Hart uses the packaging material as a canvas for his photo-realistic paintings, by injecting every bubble with acrylic paint. It’s a painstaking process, because not only does he have to get every color just right to create the desired effect, but he also has to surgically remove all the dripped paint from the backside of the material. As the Canadian artist explains on his website “the exchange between paint and the air inside the bubble displaces one of the two elements. As the paint is injected into a bubble, the excess drips down the back of the piece.” So, after he completes one of his amazing artworks, he has to remove all the drippings from the backside of the plastic.

Bradley Hart was inspired to use bubble wrap as the main medium for his art by an expereince where overzealous art gallery security guards instructed visitors not to touch the works of art, or even a leftover roll of bubble wrapping used to package his first solo exhibition in New York. After researching the material, he discovered it was originally invented as a modern form of wall covering, a failed experiment. His first piece involving bubble wrap involved a piece of the material stretched over a stretcher and signed – an homage paid to its original use.

Photos © Bradley Hart

via Lost at E Minor