Spent the weekend drawing a portrait entirely out of schematic symbols and it actually worked

I did the same kind of thing a couple years back with a portrait of my dog, all built out of schematic symbols in Eagle. The shading trick you figured out is exactly what saved mine too. I used ground symbols for the dark patches in her fur and it worked shockingly well. Fur texture is way more forgiving than a human face, I'll say that much, since nobody can tell you got a whisker wrong. One thing I learned the hard way: don't scale it up after you've placed everything. I stretched mine to print on 11x17 and every symbol got fat and blurry. Had to redo the whole thing at final size. Whatever spacing you're using for your dense versus light areas, lock that in before you place a single part, because the illusion falls apart if the density ratio changes.

My wife did the same thing yours did, walked past the printer and did a double take. That's the whole payoff right there. It hung in my garage workshop for years til the sun faded it to a ghost. If you ever do a second one, try zigzag ground symbols along the hairline, they read as waves better than anything else I found.

Cool project. I went a slightly diffrent road with mine a while back: instead of just leaving it as a CAD drawing, I laid out a board in KiCad with my grandfather's face done in copper pours and traces, then sent it off to one of those cheap fab houses. Ended up framed on the wall as an actual green PCB, and the copper facial features catch the light differently depending on where you stand. Cost me next to nothing since I tacked it onto an order I was already placing for a real project. Your point about it reading better from a distance matches my experiance exactly. Up close the eye wants to count individual parts and the illusion falls apart, but standing back it snaps into a face. Same reason pointillist paintings work I guess. I never bothered making mine electrically real either, but one honest warning from my mistake: keep it far away from anything you might actually populate. Mine sat in a folder for months and a coworker almost sent it to assembly as a joke before checking. A face made of parts that do nothing is funny right up until someone builds it.

Tried something like this for my brother in law's retirement card last year, his face out of switches and fuses in an old copy of DipTrace. The forehead killed me, no single symbol was big enough so I ended up overlapping rows of battery symbols until it looked right. Also learned the hard way that anything with a diagonal line in it turns to mush when you shrink the whole thing down, so I stopped designing small and zooming out to check. Started placing everything at the size it would actually print and it went way faster. Inductors for the mouth is a smart call, I bet that reads way better than the zigzag symbols.

The view-distance thing tracks with my experience too. I drew my old boss as a joke out of relays and wire crossings, and up close it was a mess, but from the far end of the break room it just clicked. Something about how the eye blends all the little symbols togehter instead of reading them individually.

Did you try printing a smaller test copy? I found shrinking mine down to like a quarter page actually made the face sharper, weirdly. Might be worth a shot before you frame the big one.