Beethoven

I always wanted to make a portrait of Beethoven using just notes to describe the dark and light areas of his face. I tried to see if there was any way that Photoshop could do this automatically, without me having to place each note by hand. I could not find anything that could work this way. I end up using After Effects to achieve what I wanted. After Effects is a compositing program but it has a set of nifty effects , like the Photoshop filters, and one of them, particle playground, was what I needed for my design. I first created nine notes and other musical symbols. Then I created a layer that is a set of many particles, each particle will be a note or musical symbol. In order to arrange the notes and musical symbols in the likeness of Beethoven I used a grayscale public domain picture of Beethoven as a guidance. The filter reads the grayscale values of the image and it randomly places one of the nine notes or symbols in every particle position adjusting the size of the note or symbol according to the grayscale value. White pixels create small notes and black pixels create large notes, with gray values creating the in-between sizes. The image on left is the grayscale image of Beethoven and the image on the right is the output of the effect: If you click on the image it will take you to the various products.