Mosaic Maker : ~225/Kendra


CAD / Mosaic Maker / John Gramley / Kendra

My First LUGNET-created Mosaic

Since Todd posted about the creation of his Mosaic Maker, I’ve wanted to give it a try. And now I have. The subject is my daughter, Kendra.

This is the original picture:

It’s a portrait of Kendra taken at age 7 months (she’s almost 2 years now) and it’s one of my favorites.

Here’s the output I got from Todd’s Mosaic Maker:

I used the following settings:

Mosaic width - 500 bricks (I was only going to use about 60 of them)
Mosaic style - 1x1 bricks (view from side)
Color dithering - error diffusion dither
Gamma correction - 1
Color palette - universal color palette plus green

Since I didn’t have anything close to the number bricks required to build such a large mosaic, I only used the portion of it that contained her head:

Then all I had to do was enlarge the picture and print it out:

Yes, there clearly is a problem. The yellow portion of the color cartridge was dried up so the colors were very skewed. Black was still black, blue was blue, and white was white, but green was cyan, red was magenta, and yellow was white with just a few specks of red - just enough to barely distinguish it from white.

Anyway, here are the results:

I really liked the way it came out. And so far, so has everyone I’ve shown it to. Everyone wants to know how I came up with the coloring and shading, and I’ve told them about Todd’s Mosaic Maker. They all think it’s a cool app/service. I totally agree!

It’s 62 bricks wide and 63 bricks high. Both measurements include the red “frame.” It took about 25 hours and about 5,000 bricks. Building it required overcoming some difficulties, but it was pretty easy. I basically made it 2 bricks thick, but alternated the building techinique for each layer. First I made a 2-brick layer of 2xn red bricks to serve as a base and a frame. Then the first mosaic layer was 1xn (mostly 1x1) bricks with a row of 1x8 and 1x6 red bricks behind them. The next layer was made of 2xn (mostly 2x1 - a.k.a. 1x2) bricks. The ends of each layer are 2 red bricks to continue the “frame” idea up the sides.

You can get an idea of the alternating layers idea here:

It makes for
a really interesting effect!!

It makes for
a really interesting effect!!

Making the mosaic 2 bricks thick and alternating the layers produced a pretty stable structure, but if I do another that size or large, I’ll make it 3 or 4 bricks thick so that the back will be a solid color. This alternating technique can be easily modified to make a thicker, more stable picture.

As a side note, while 2 bricks thick is pretty stable horizontally and vertically, it is very prone to bowing and torsion problems. This became apparent when my sister was holding it and was pressing it too close to her body. It bowed and it shattered. Fortunately Lego sticks to itself pretty well, and it broke into several large pieces, and about a hundred 1-, 2-, and 3-piece sections. It only took about three hours to put it back together.

Credits and thanks

Heaps of thanks to Todd for the cool Mosaic Maker. I’ve had a hankering to make Lego art, but am not very good (not yet) at building things freehand without a plan in front of me. Todd’s Mosaic Maker removed dealing with that hang-up for a good long time. Seriously, the Mosaic Maker is an incredibly easy application to use and offers a tremendous amount of flexibility and utility, so you can get the image you want.

Thanks again to Todd for the incredible FTX tools. It really makes web publishing easy!

Thanks also to Kevin Loch for hosting the images on Brickshelf.com.

Thanks to Kiddie Kandids for taking such a great picture. I highly recommend them. They’re very patient with kids who aren’t always willing to have their pictures taken on command.

Primary content in this document is © John Gramley. All other text, images, or trademarks in this document are the intellectual property of their respective owners.