Juan Osborne’s Pictures Are Worth a Thousand Words

Spanish amateur artist Juan Osborne uses several hundred thousand words to recreate famous images and icons.

Lady Agnew



"Words are powerful, they go straight into the human mind and really add something to my pictures that you can't get from a regular picture taken with a camera. Mine have stories behind them that can be read, which is pretty unique," he says.

Juan searches for the most popular words from famous quotes, song lyrics or transcriptions associated with his subjects, then uses his netbook and a custom software to piece them together and recreate the image. Juan decided to take matters in his own hands and build the software himself.

"People are surprised when I tell them that my work is created using a standard netbook and software that I built myself - which is very basic. There are no limits to creativity - if I need something or think of a new way to make something I just create a new application to do it. I feel free without the need for commercial software."

Playing with… Einstein



"I made a little modification to my program by adding the possibility of randomly pre-inserting some words… the target is to create some kind of “word search” game. In this example you have to find numbers form 0 to 9."

Playing with… Lennon



Same as Eintein post. Now you have to find ten words related to John Lennon.

Playing with… Marilyn



Another WordSearch game. This time you have to find ten words related to the most famous blonde ever.

I Have A Dream



Obama Speeches



"First I took the transcriptions of more than one hundred Obama speeches from the website http://obamaspeeches.com/. Then I counted all words using an adapted version of the Snowball stemmer for Processing (thanks to Lot!, http://feenelcaos.org/). I also picked up an Obama photo using Google Image to find a good one.

Finally I use my ‘image pattern searcher’ algorithm (I have to find a name for it) to fit all the words in the image. In this case the more times the word appears in the speeches the bigger it is (proportionally)."

Simone de Beauvoir



"I want to share with you my work in progress files of my new tool, still in beta stage. The goal is to be able to spread full phrases, instead of single words. It’s more complicated and I still need time to adjust the variables and the find the better way to get nice results, but you can take a look at my current tryouts."

Anonymous names



"I love the David Lloyd’s mask for “The Doll” (read about V for Vendetta), and how it mix with the idea of an anonymous group of people.

In order to translate this concept I took the top 1000 most commonly used baby boy and girl names in USA throughout 2010 from this website and spread them over an image of The Doll. The bigger are the most commonly used."

The Scream



"Based in the famous painting by Edvard Munch. As you can read in Wikipedia, Munch described his inspiration for the image thus: “I was walking along a path with two friends — the sun was setting — suddenly the sky turned blood red — I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence — there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city — my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”

I took the last part of his description and spread it over the painting."

Starry Night Quote



A beautiful Van Gogh painting with the words of his famous quote: “I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day”.

All images are © Copyright of Juan Osborne

Check his website: http://www.juanosborne.com/