Spotty art proves ‘Formula’ for success

Following her Art & Design Degree Show success, artist and MMU graduate Nikki Douthwaite has created a portrait of Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton - using 250,000 hole-punched paper dots.

Nikki, 34, from Timperley, spent 12 weeks painstakingly sticking each of the tiny dots on to the massive 8ft by 5ft picture.

From a distance the work looks just like a traditional painting of the F1 driver. It’s only when you get up close that it becomes clear that it is made up of small circles of coloured paper cut from a hole punch.

Unique technique

Nikki came up with the unusual technique during her Interactive Arts degree at MMU, after being inspired by the pointillism work of 19th century French painter Georges-Pierre Seurat.

Seurat created images using dots of coloured paint - which the viewer’s eye then blends - and Nikki developed her own unique method by using dots of paper instead of dots of paint, a pair of tweezers and double-sided sticky tape.

For her final year project Nikki recreated Seurat’s famous painting ‘Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ using over half a million paper dots, and it soon become the star attraction of the 2008 Degree Show.

Labour of love

But Nikki says creating the image of Lewis Hamilton was a real labour of love.

She said: “Having done a landscape I wanted to do a portrait. I was at the British Grand Prix just a couple of days before I graduated and that’s when I decided what I would do next. I’m a massive Formula One fan and have been since I was a little girl.”

For more information about Art and Design courses at MMU go to http://www.artdes.mmu.ac.uk.