Mosaic Help?

[Rail Co]

Hello,

Recently I have wanted to make a Mosaic of me and my girlfriend. I was looking around on bricklinks mosaic maker and Bright Bricks new mosaic service. I find it hard to get a decent looking Mosaic without paying upwards of $200. If I couldn't make one of us together I was also thinking of making two smaller ones with each person taking up one Mosaic. I was wondering what people had suggestions on for buying bulk bricks cheaply. How to design one using only current lego colors (if that looks decent). And what a good price is for either 1 64x64 Mosaic or 2 32x32/48x48 Mosaics would be.

Thanks!

[Littleworlds]

Hi there! I found your question quite intriguing and went to do some research. My results so far are not quite perfect, but things are definitely pointing into the right direction. I use Gimp as example for an image editor, because its free and cross platform.

So, after you opened your picture, you go to Image>Scale Image and turn the size to a convenient level. Maybe something like 32x32 for a square picture.

Next I looked for ways to get the Lego colours imported and found this link. I just saved the picture with the colour palette (not sure if that's all, but lets just assume it is), went to gimp and followed the instruction of this link.

The result looked decent, but not 100% perfect. I would it prefer to make more use of the yellows, but I think with a bit of experimenting with increasing the yellow-value under Colours>Colour Balance, (but before converting to the Lego palette!) its doable to achieve acceptable results.

The resulting picture can then be used as "instructions". But don't ask me how to determine how many 1x1 plates of each colour you use. I hope I could help you anyway!

 

[MAB]

Mosaics aren't cheap. I'd give up on getting two faces on one mosaic, it cannot be done on a small one and retain detail.

32x32 don't work that well unless you just do the face. 48x48 is much better for a head, hair and neck.

But that is 48x48=2304 studs. At 1c a stud, it is $230 even without the baseplate. So if you want to pay only say $100, you are going to need to aim for < 0.5c per stud. Then it really depends on what you are going to use - plates or bricks? Tiles will be too expensive for you. Then do you want just 1x1s? As this is also probably too expensive. For big blocks of colour you can use larger plates and get the price per stud down, but this does make the mosaic look a bit less detailed.

Do you need the background? If not, getting rid of it can save a lot, but it does make the edges of a face look a bit unrefined.

 

Edited September 26, 2017 by MAB

[MAB]

Here are some images of David Beckham, face and neck only, done with BL Mosaick.

The highest resolution one is great (~$5000) and they get worse but still acceptable down to 64x64. 48x48 is borderline - it's just about recognizable if you know who it is meant to be (as you would with yourself / family). 32x32 is probably too low resolution. So the lower limit for this shot is probably 48x48.

 

The other trick is to play with the colour pallette (not possible in BL) - and exclude expensive colours.

160x160

112x112

80x80

 

64x64

48x48

32x32

16x16

 

Edited September 26, 2017 by MAB