( Wired ) -- This is a selfie made of blood . Yes , real , straight-from-veins-of-a-human blood . The human you 're looking at is Ted Lawson , an artist living in Brooklyn . These are his first blood paintings . Lawson created the works for an upcoming exhibition , The Map Is Not the Territory , opening September 11 at the Joseph Gross Gallery in NYC , and it should be noted that he did n't originally set out to paint with his vital fluids . Then again , who does ? The whole weird thing came about as a larger investigation into how Lawson could use a CNC milling machine in new ways to create his artworks . You 'll notice the blood is actually dispensed onto a brush controlled by the CNC 's robotic arm . One day as an experiment , Lawson hooked up a pen to the CNC machine 's arm to see how it might draw . It drew really well ! `` I was doing a drawing of the moon and thought , 'Oh , this could be really cool to do in my own blood , '' he recalls . `` It was a logical progression . '' Any logicality involving drawing with your own blood is debatable , but Lawson persisted and adapted his process to replace traditional ink with body ink . To make his selfie , Lawson began by taking a photo of himself in the nude . In Illustrator he rendered the photo into vectors then used Rhino to turn the art into code that the CNC machine could read . Lawson hooked himself up to a needle and funneled his blood into the machine like one might do with ink . The machine dispensed lines of blood , creating a pixelated version of Lawson 's original photo . `` If you 're right up close to it , you can almost see the lines of code , '' he says of the artwork . Blood Is n't an Easy Medium . The issue with blood , or any other liquid for that matter , is that it tends to pool on paper . To combat this , Lawson constructed a completely flat table and used a vacuum to suck the paper against it as tightly as possible . This allowed the blood to dispense evenly onto the paper , reducing the risk of globbing . After the paintings were finished , Lawson sprayed them with an acrylic fixativeâ€ ” '' So they do n't rot , '' he notes . There 's a trick to making a good blood painting . Lawson 's involves lots of water and a pre blood-letting cheeseburger . `` I found that fatty foods make for a nicer flow , '' he explains . Lots of practice helps , too . Lawson experimented with making two full-sized selfies before he finished the final painting . The selfie painting took around three hours to complete , but Lawson says the total blood used is probably less than what you 'd regularly donate . Despite describing himself as squeamish when it comes to blood and needles , the artist has found that if you stick a needle in your arm enough times , it gets easier to ignore . `` Blood is just a medium , '' he says . `` When you focus on something other than yourself , like making a drawing , it becomes ink and stops being blood . '' More from Wired : . The mystery of go , the ancient game that computers still ca n't win . 30 years after Chernobyl 's meltdown , gripping photos expose the human fallout . I liked everything I saw on Facebook for two days . Here 's what It did to me . Subscribe to WIRED magazine for less than $ 1 an issue and get a FREE GIFT ! Click here ! Copyright 2011 Wired.com .
Ted Lawson uses a robot to print selfies -- using his blood in place of ink . The Brooklyn-based artist uses a computer-controlled arm to paint his blood onto a canvas . Hide Caption