JAMES HAGGERTY MOSAIC PORTFOLIO

DARTH

12,352 multi-colored staples on a 25″ x 40″ painted board.

My fourth mosaic was yet another in my Star Wars series and another iteration image of the iconic Darth Vader character, called simply, Darth. I am constantly searching for new colored staples to expand my palette and I buy several thousand at one time. By the time I began work on Darth, I amassed a large collection. It was great to be able to use so many cool colors such as cyan, light blue and violet on Vader’s mask, especially on the helmet at the top of the piece.

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DOXIE

75,738 Multi-Colored Staples on a 32″ x 40″ Painted Board

For my latest work, Doxie (Canis Lupus Familiaris), 75,738 staples were used, the largest amount I ever put into a single piece. This piece depicts a dog, and I searched high and low to find the right colors for the fur. Over two dozen colors were arranged side by side so that I achieve optical blending. As with all of the mosaics, this is a painstakingly slow process, but I’m extremely proud of the results.

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DID YOU HEAR THAT?

33,580 Multi-Colored Staples on a 29″ x 40″ Painted Board

I followed up Limbo with Did You Hear That?, my rendering of the droid C-3PO, also from the Star Wars movies. When I created C-3PO’s metallic shell, I once again utilized optical mixing with fourteen distinct colors to get the warm gold and cool silver tones. The detail shots highlight a rich tapestry of over 33,000 densely placed colored staples.

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FLO

19,209 Multi-Colored Staples on a 30″ x 30″ Painted Board

After my Star Wars mosaics received so much attention, I was hired by Progressive Insurance to create a portrait of their spokesperson Flo for their WTFlo campaign. This design utilizes Progressive Insurance’s identity colors of blue, white and gold with predominately repeated horizontal rows of staples. I pushed my technique by overlapping staples like in Flo’s eyes and smile.

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LIMBO

21,458 Multi-Colored Staples on a 40″ x 32″ Painted Board

The second staple mosaic is of the Star Wars bounty hunter character, Greedo, Limbo is a more complex piece than The Side. Here, I experimented with optical blending (where two or more colors are placed beside one another to create new color variations when viewed from a short distance from the piece) which is present in all of my staple mosaics from this point on. I expanded the color palette from previously using two colors in The Side to eleven to create nuanced color mixing in the green skin tones. It took over twenty-one thousand staples to accomplish this.

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THE SIDE

10,496 Multi-Colored Staples on a 40″ x 32″ Painted Board

The first staple mosaic I created features the iconic Darth Vader from the Star Wars movies. My goal in using the medium of staples was to mimic the color and shading that I had achieved with traditional art materials​, like oil paint. Since I worked on a black background, I formed light and dark areas by respectively adding more or less staples.

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HEART #1

13,982 Multi-Colored Staples on a 12″ x 12″ Painted Board

The next mosaic I created was Heart​ #1, which is an experimental piece where I carefully placed 12,000 staples which emanate in a spiral from the center of a heart. I look forward to applying this new method in future pieces.

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