While doing a search for propaganda ideas, I found this site that celebrates all sorts of Star Wars fan art. There’s probably a few dozen pieces to inspire new ds106 assignments. One in particular caught my eye, as ready for some ds106 riffing, Darth Vader QR Code. It was apparently created by a Greek graphic designer/blogger and embroidered onto a pillow as well!

So here’s my effort at some Jim Groom Art, for the first time since I made some ds106radio art to celebrate the awesome NYC Jam this past summer.

I looked up some of the specs for QR Codes, but ultimately focused on using just the three orienting boxes that are iconically familiar. To create this, I made a 64 x 64 pixel image in Photoshop in bitmap mode, which restricts your palette to only two colors – black & white. In that space I drew the three boxes with the a two pixel width pencil tool.

Using Mikhail Gershovich’s Jim Groom head, I did some work converting to grayscale, then reducing the file size a lot. Using the Dodge (highlights) and Burn (shadows) tools I was able to contrast specific areas of the face I wanted to. Finally I brought the part of the head into the QR code space and did some more 2 pixel pencil tool work, erasing and drawing until happy.

Only bummer is that the QR Code is not scannable, that would have been a really cool hack! Of course I would have pointed the code to the Bava Blog.