ABOUT

Six typographic mosaic portraits of Pete Buttigieg, made by Charis Tsevis at Tsevis Studio in October 2026. From a distance you see a face. Up close you read a crowd of messages: Hope. Freedom. Common Decency. Neighbors, Not Enemies. Let's Win the Era.

CONCEPT
A person is never one message. We are made of countless tiles: our history, our work, the hopes of the people around us. In these portraits every tile is a message of its own. They are a positive tribute: they attack no one, and every piece says what we could be for, not who we should be against. Some pieces carry the year 2028. Read it as a hope, not as news.

EXECUTION
The library: 5,955 pieces designed in the studio from a study of American political posters, signs and print (letterpress, screen print, hand-painted signs, campaign buttons): 3,406 words and slogans, 1,515 single letters, 761 state names and 273 small images. Made with Adobe Creative Cloud and a ComfyUI model that simulates paper, ink and other materials.
The layout: Mozaix, my own mosaic software, places the pieces with Jigsaw Packing: irregular cut shapes fitted edge to edge, larger where the face is calm and smaller, down to 71 pixels, where it needs detail.
Five layers: a background, three main layers that form the face, and a detail layer of thin strips that follow the lines, shadows and lights of the face.

RESULTS
Six portraits of 4,068 to 5,556 pieces each, at least 8,192 x 12,826 pixels, plus seven short animations. Free to share for non-commercial use with credit under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; full-resolution files on my Flickr.