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Artist Handwrites Entire Scripts to Create Unique Portraits of Movie Characters

By Emma Taggart on December 5, 2018

The Princess Bride
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Many art mediums require plenty of patience and concentration, but artist Mike Matola shows a whole new level of creative endurance. He creates pop-culture posters by handwriting entire scripts and song lyrics to form the images. By drawing upon the positive and negative space, each silhouetted word art portrait is brought to life, line by line.

Matola’s collection of typography posters include handwritten depictions of popular actors, musicians, and fictional characters. Freddy Mercury is comprised entirely from Queen’s Best Of album lyrics, while Buttercup and Westley from The Princess Bride are composed of the words from the movie’s entire script. Each piece can take up to 80 hours to complete, showcasing Matola’s incredible commitment to his art. For one particularly impressive My Neighbor Totoro-inspired design, Matola spent 6 months writing the entire script in its original Japanese language.

Matola explains, “The poster was made by sitting down and writing out each word with a pen, line by line, down the page and increasing and decreasing the space between the letters until the portrait emerged.” Similar to a pointillism painting, from afar the hand-written typography blends together to create the image. Up close, the viewer can see countless tiny characters in black ink, sprawled across the page.

You can see more from Matola’s growing portfolio and purchase his poster designs on Etsy.