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by Maria Sofou

Brazilian artist Álvaro Franca has created an amazing series of portraits of his favorite authors by using just a typewriter.

Franca, who started his project while he was an exchange student at Cambridge School of Art, developed the technique of creating grayscale images on the typewriter and then was able to make the portraits in this unique way. If you look closely to Franca’s works, you can see that he mostly uses lowercase X, O, M, and I to form the faces while others are obscured by being typed over multiple times to create the darker portions of the image.

The portraits include Jack Kerouac, Clarice Lispector, Charles H. Bukowski, J.D. Salinger, and Jose Saramago – all these world-famous authors used typewriters themselves.

An extremely unique work! Watch a time lapse video of Franca making the portraits and see his work below:

Jose_Saramago typewritten-portraits_05 typewritten-portraits_04 typewritten-portraits_02 typewritten-portraits_06