Nella Last Pixel Portrait

A community portrait of Nella Last, Housewife 49 in Barrow Library made from 25,000 ration token stickers (Up for Arts Cumbria/Cumbria Library Service).

Librarian adding a finished card to the portrait.

Pixel Portraits

The basic idea of pixel portraits is to create an image made up using lots of squares. Like a paint by numbers but with a grid of squares to paint - or in this case stickers.

Background

Nella Last was a housewife from Barrow who wrote a diary through the Second World War for the Mass Observation Archive . As the archive was anonymous she was referred to as Housewife 49. Her diary was published as “Nella Last’s War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife 49”. As the BBC put it : “Her record of events offers a unique insight into one woman’s war - on the Home Front.”

Project outline

After our first community pixel portraits in Kendal Library we wanted to take things up a notch. So we went bigger, used a lot more colours and created custom ration token sticker designs.

The set up:

Nella Last portrait

The original photo of Nella tidied up a bit to remove the background.

Pixel portrait maker web app

We made a web app create the image, work out the stickers and to generate all the files we needed.

Print file thumbnails in windows explorer

Windows File Explorer turned out to be a surprising handy way to check sheet numbers!

The ration token palette files ready for the printers.

All the ration token files in explorer.

Ration token stickers sheets with outer bit being peeled off.

We found (carefully) removing the sticker surrounds sped up the sticking process.

Girl holding up hand art made from stickers.

Dot uses all the sticker sheet cast off to make an impromptu artwork.

Jennie sorting stickers into packs

We created packs for the primary school kids so they had just the stickers they needed. Took us late into the night, but proved to be worth it.

Chris and Jennie with large plywood board.

The fully assembled board was too tall to fit in our lounge!

Full board lying on floor of library.

Constructing the board in the library. It needed to be in three sections to fit in our car.

The event:

Man standing in front of primary school children in library.

Here I’m suggesting the primary school group aim for neatness rather than speed!

Four children peeling stickers.

The school kids did a great job sorting themselves out for stickers.

Man standing next to half completed image.

Neil popped in on his lunch break to complete a sheet.

Woman peeling stickers.

Caroline Robertson helped out during her Radio Cumbria Broadcast from the event.

Person listening to headphones, man sitting, people in background.

We had a lovely mix of people at the event throughout the day.

It turned out brilliantly:

Close up of ration token stickers.

Missing a few eggs here!

Womans face made from stickers.

And for your close up Nella.

Woman listening to headphones in front of finished picture.

Jennie relaxing after a job well done.

man asleep amongst chips and beer cans

Chris relaxing less elegantly!

Project Notes:

  • Created a program to split the image into coloured blocks. [I’m going to write up creating the program as a separate project - sometime!]
  • We decided to go for 11x11 A5 (actually slightly smaller than A5 to keep the block square.
  • We went for the smallest stickers our local printer (Fingerprints (https://fingerprints.co.uk/)) could do 12mm x 12mm.
  • We used 30 different colours each with a different ration token name (e.g. EGGS, HAM, LARD etc) although we ran out of small words so had to use 2X as a prefix to finish the list (e.g. 2X HAM).
  • Each person was given a card to fill in with token names marked where they needed to put stickers.
  • Once they completed a card they went to stick it on a giant board we’d set up with the card numbers written on.