it's art, stupid

I've been mulling about a digital art idea for a while and while I don't have the patience to create the full realization of the final vision, I did have the time (and patience) to make a pretty good approximation which is a few "coolness" points lower, but probably better looking.

It's a bit out of step with previous projects (like my collages and "eyes" page) but as someone pointed out today, it's the natural inverse of my "faces" piece. I took the text of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" (courtesy of Project Gutenberg) and superimposed some of the book's original illustrations on top -- creating an image out of the words.

The resulting files are rather large, about ~30MB, since a) the font can only get so small and stay readable b) they're .tiff (uncompressed) files c) I'm hoping to be able to print it out at somepoint, so I figured 3' x 4.5' ish was a good sounding size. If you have the bandwidth and monitor size to check out the final files, please do and give any feedback you might have. I'm not sure how much change I can make* but I'm always looking to improve things. (* the fastest computer I have is a 1.2 Ghz P3 with 512MB RAM, so Photoshop takes something like 15 minutes just to change the font size of the text. I made these two images while snowed in on Sunday)

Below I'm posting thumbnails which link to the full-sized files as well as a "zoomed in" view to better show the text/image detail (for non-bandwidth blessed). Give some feedback!