This illustration appeared in today's NY Times Sunday Magazine. I've been trying all afternoon to achieve the same effect in Photoshop using the photo of Charlotte Rampling (sigh!) as an example, but having no luck. When I looked closer at the NY Times article I noticed that the credits say "artwork by Michael Mapes; photograph of artwork by Stephen Lewis", so it appears that Michael Mapes may have actually cut a printed photograph into a thousand circles and stuck pins into each one. But still, it seems like this ought to be do-able in Photoshop.
My idea was to create a custom brush of several roundish shapes and then use scattering and shape dynamics to randomly scatter circular shapes across the photo, create a clipping mask from that, and add the white strokes that are present in most of the circles. (I was going to worry about the push-pins later.) But that didn't work at all... all I did was create an amorphous blob rather than hundreds of individual cirles. Now I'm not sure how to approach this without actually creating each circle one at a time, which would take forever. I'm going to keep plugging away, but I thought this might make a good challenge to see if anyone can re-create the effect.
My idea was to create a custom brush of several roundish shapes and then use scattering and shape dynamics to randomly scatter circular shapes across the photo, create a clipping mask from that, and add the white strokes that are present in most of the circles. (I was going to worry about the push-pins later.) But that didn't work at all... all I did was create an amorphous blob rather than hundreds of individual cirles. Now I'm not sure how to approach this without actually creating each circle one at a time, which would take forever. I'm going to keep plugging away, but I thought this might make a good challenge to see if anyone can re-create the effect.