The whole point of a printer is to mass-produce images and documents so us humans don’t have to do it by hand. So the idea of manually drawing out something in the style of a CMYK printer must sound like madness… or art, depending on who you talk to.
Given an image, The Human Printer — actually a collection of several people with all the patience in the world — will recreate it using CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-blacK) halftones coloured by hand. Two services are offered, “HP 1.1” and “HP 1.2”. The former will generate a “one off reproduction” that focuses on how the “process deals with images of differing qualities such as tonal contrast, detail, colour spectrums etc”.
HP 1.2, on the other hand, is all about mass-production, though I’m sure its definition of “mass-production” will probably be very different to everyone else’s. The idea is that it “highlight[s] the unique nature of each printing process”.
If you’d like to see the results, below on the left is a finished image, with a zoomed-in shot on the right.
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The service is open to the public, if you’re keen on your own hand-printed image. You won’t find any pricing, as it’s determined on a case-by-case basis using the size and detail as parameters. I’m going to take a guess that for us regular folk, you might want to stick with your trusty home inkjet.
[Human Printer, via Colossal]