When you blow up an image to many times its actual size and see each individual pixel, all of the details and color gradations that seemed so fine and subtle suddenly become so coarse and abstract you can hardly believe you’re looking at the same picture. Artist Christian Faur reproduces this effect with the most unexpected of media: crayons, set into frames with the tips out.

Often working with pictures taken during the Great Depression, Faur chooses crayons in colors that match the values in the photographs. He then painstakingly puts them into place. Seen close-up, the works can be seen for what they are: patterns of crayons. But take a few steps back and the image comes together.

The three-dimensional nature of the crayons creates an image that seems to shift as you move around it, going out of focus as you view it from either side.

“My earliest memories of making art involve the use of wax crayons,” says Faur. “I can still remember the pleasure of opening a new box of crayons: the distinct smell of the wax, the beautifully colored tips, everything still perfect and unused. Using the first crayon from a new box always gave me a slight pain. Through a novel technique that I have developed, I again find myself working with the familiar form of the crayon.”