iReport: Jimi Hendrix gets shuffled

(CNN) -- Some call him "the Post-it Note Boy," after the 10-foot tall Ray Charles mosaic he made out of those sticky colored squares last summer.

Now, David Alvarez of Leavenworth, Washington, has unveiled an even bigger, even more original creation. Using more than 8,500 Bicycle playing cards, he recently constructed a portrait of guitarist legend Jimi Hendrix.

While others have used Post-it Notes for mosaics like this, as far as Alvarez can tell from Internet searches, he is the first to experiment with playing cards as the medium for a portrait mosaic.

Alvarez, 20, will graduate in June with an associate of arts degree from Wenatchee Valley College, Washington. He planned this project in November as part of his schoolwork, but didn't construct it until March.

He hopes to go to Central Washington University and teach art.

"Any kid that tells me 'I can't draw,' I'm going to tell him, 'I did this whole project without lifting a pencil," he said.

His strategy for the portrait was stacking the cards in the precise order he wanted before laying them out. That way, while up on scaffolding, Alvarez could simply put the cards down, from left to right, without having to figure out which card came next.

With his stepfather's help, Alvarez put up the scaffolding, then put up foam core boards to be used with double-sided adhesive. He worked for 21 hours on the day he laid out the cards, breaking only for an hour and a half.

"You don't even feel thirsty or hungry, [you're] so determined to finish it," he said. He said he was "not even fazed by sleepiness."

He had the project up for a one-day show, which went so well that he had another showing at the Leavenworth Festhalle. But after he received his grade from school, he had to take it down from its location shown in a video. Watch a time-lapse video of Alvarez creating his project. »

Alvarez chose Hendrix because he listens to his music, and lives three hours from Hendrix's hometown of Seattle, Washington. The image he picked to work with is from the album "Crash Landing," and it seemed to Alvarez that it would emerge definitively from the cards.

As with the Post-it Note project, which appeared on CNN in August, he used Photoshop to divide the image into pieces and map out exactly which colors would go where. Check out his Post-it Note project.

He received two of the 168 decks he used from his art teacher. Later, Alvarez realized that he would have liked to have involved others in the community by asking for playing card donations, and then showing contributors where their cards ended up. "I could have said, 'this is your row, this is your row,' " he said.

His friend Eric Splittgerber, of Seattle, filmed Alvarez executing the entire project. Splittgerber says he prefers this artwork over the Post-it Note mosaic because playing cards are a more esoteric medium.

"I made sure when we were putting it together that he didn't accentuate the ace of spades or the joker too much," he said. "The last card is the 8 of diamonds." E-mail to a friend