Large Projects
Each of these projects has been worked on for over a year.
Table of Contents:
Tennis Ball Project
This is a portrait of Roger Federer made of tennis balls. The project required over 1800 tennis balls, and it is not finished yet. Collection of the tennis balls took around a year, and the process of constructing the piece took a full day (this can be seen in the video below). This was not the whole portrait because there was not enough room in the house that was used, but once the opportunity arises, Ben will make the piece. Also, tennis strings have been sewn through the tennis balls, so now once the piece is complete, it will be possible to hang it up. For the black background, Ben has collected tennis windscreens, and the final piece will use these instead of the clothes used in the video.
Million Word Portrait
This project took about 14 months, and it also is not finished. This is one of what was supposed to be 6 portraits in a series. This portrait used 1000000 of the word "Jew" to create the man. The idea of the project is to show just how many Jews were killed by the Nazis and how awful the atrocities were, but for this very reason the project was too big for Ben to finish. At the rate this portrait was made, the series would have taken another 6 years. The process is the same as the Word Portrait series, but it is slowed down by the fact that a computer cannot properly handle as many objects as this series required to be in a file. The speed slowed down, and you can see just how slow it became in the first of the videos below. Ben worked on the series for 3-6 hours a day for the entire 14 months until it was complete. If this series ever made a profit, the hopes were to donate any earnings to the Breman Museum in Atlanta, which inspired the series.