Melissa was great in Whiplash <| sep |> You do realize they took Donald of all if your not subscribed . it is all over the Donald right now . <| sep |> You ' re almost there . I think the example picture given in your assignment might be misleading you a little bit . To be clear , the only recursion we ' re using is to repeatedly downsample the image . The idea here is that you just want to run loops that iterate through the picture for each row , for each column once for each 2 x 2 grid in the picture . Here ' s the earlier image I showed , with a grid visualization . Notice how we ' ve divided the image into equal pieces of 2 x 2 blocks ? Once we have that loop working , then the next step would be to average the colors there . That color is then used as a single pixel in the output image . How about you give it a try , and attempt to write the loops necessary to walk through the image such that you hit each block shown in the example picture ?