Portraits made from thread passed around nail-heads

Kumi Yamashita's "Constellation" series are portraits made from a continuous piece of black thread, strung around and around a dense mesh of nails hammered into a white-painted wooden board. Shown here: "Erik".

Constellation

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Brad H.

Quite amazing. I looked at this before on my phone and it just looks like a binary image of yore.
- Jason Baker
  
  Agreed. You hit the nail on the head.
  
  (Sorry.)
BrotherPower

We did the same thing in elementary school, as I recall, only with multicolored thread. However, ours looked like shit.
Jonathan Roberts

I love when something you’re familiar with gets taken to a completely new level. We used to have a picture in our house that was made using a similar method. It was pretty basic, a bit like a more complicated version of the old Windows screensaver “mystify your mind”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-howMhFecQ
Baldhead

I always felt things like this fall into the category of the how being more interesting than the result. As in, you see the picture and think “meh” then someone tells you how it was done and then it’s cool.
http://twitter.com/beep54orama B E Pratt

Kinda reminds me of the 1884 picture that is of Jesus but done with, apparently, the single stroke of a pen or pencil. Hum, it really needs to be enlarged to full size to really get the effect.
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

Couldn’t find anything about her technique on this…is she using a projector or something and working off of that?