I can’t take all the credit for the work involved in this one.  There are 9 32 x 32 stud plates (which makes this 30 inches by 30 inches!) that I divvied up to the 9 kids in my class this year.  I used software to break a standard image down to 96 x 96 pixels.  Each pixel then corresponds to 1 lego stud, of which there are 9,216.  I then took an output of colors in each of the 96 rows and imported them into Excel, where I could manipulate cell sizes to match up to 32 x 32 cells per sheet.  Each student just had a print off to work from and mark which studs they filled.  The print outs were just black and white, so they had no idea what they were making.  I really liked the concept of using excel as instructions to make large scale mosaics, so I’ll definitely keep that in my bag of tricks for future works.

There are about 5,000 pieces in the mosaic.  The kids had no idea what they were building collectively until the center plate was done and put next to 2 other finished plates.  I did end up having to throw in a bit of time since 2 kids missed class and I wanted to make sure they would be able to finish it in the last class.  Total labor hours is somewhere in the 20+ hour range.

click on the images for larger views. 

Don’t be a walking billboard.

You know how people put ribbons on their shirts or even their cars to raise awareness for a certain charity or campaign?  What’s the difference between a pink ribbon on your chest and a Nike swoosh?  Is Polo or Ralph Lauren a brand that you strongly believe in and want to promote?  Why are you paying to wear clothes that carry their advertising on them?  I think we should all have the confidence in ourselves and display it in the form of race car driver advertising.  If you want me to promote your brand, you should give me a contract.  Otherwise, no deal.

This was part of a challenge this year to make something homemade for 5 people.  Adam’s always been a big Who fan.  Probably took 3 hours to design, build, and then glue.

This is actually my second foray into the LEGO mosaic realm. The first one was a freehand design of the LEGO logo. A mosaic of Albert Einstein would require a little assistance though.

There are 2 methods for creating mosaics in LEGO bricks, this one is a studs out technique, where the studs face the viewer. It’s probably the easiest to do, because you can match up 1×1 bricks with a square pixel of an image. The other methods is the studs up technique, which involves stacking the plates or bricks vertically. With that method, you lose the ease in design, but you gain the opportunity for resolution since the profile of a plate is 2:5.

For this Albert Einstein design, I knew I wanted to keep it smaller scale. 32×48 studs looked like a nice portrait size and i had 3 16×32 base plates as a great canvas to begin. I took the image, cropped it down to the correct ratio, and then decreased the size down to something I could translate into block. If you just shrink it to 32×48 pixels…well, let’s just say it doesn’t resemble Albert Einstein anymore.

So, after 5 hours of adjusting blocks and trying to get it to resemble the picture, we have this:

I think I might have an easily producible art here, that I’m thinking of entertaining commissioned mosaics if I were to be approached.

Here’s the LEGO logo mosaic, if you were curious:

You know I’m not much of a football fan at all, but even that can’t stop the forces of inspiration.  I want to try to create LEGO creations for each season and display them around the house until I think of something new to create, and the Steelers going to the superbowl was the biggest event I could think of.  I did a quick google search for “pittsburgh steelers LEGO helmet” just to make sure no one had done it before, and then set off!

I used basically all my black 1x and 2x pieces.  Pretty ridiculous.  I had been itching to try my hand at a sphere, because this has always been a struggle of mine.  It’s hard to think in 3 dimensions while building in 2 dimensions.  I think I’ve found the trick is to set a base shape and then build exactly the same on both sides.  Having a consistent and uniform curve makes the brain accept the rounded shape a lot easier!

I built most of the helmet in about 4 hours, and left one side empty while I brainstormed on what to do about the logo.  I think it turned out pretty well!  If you have a good eye, you’ll notice that the logo doesn’t say “Steelers”.  I had just put a 1×3 black brick centered in the circle, but it looked crappy.  The trick of creating in LEGO is the art of suggestion!

I did have some extra 1×2 black and yellow, so I threw them together to spell out “Steelers”, even though I couldn’t make the stencil font come out and keep the proportion small.  At first attempt, I had the back of the helmet sticking out way too far back.  I brought it in about 4 studs and tapered the bottom in.  Perfect.  Total time about 10 hours.

I was inspired to recreate the Pittsburgh Penguins logo in LEGO bricks on Sunday.

It took about 2.5 hours from start to finish.  I started off with just making the yellow triangle in the back to figure out what scale I would be able to achieve with the pieces I have.  I knew I wanted to make it a little more 3D, so I started with the white belly next making some 2×4 white pieces stick out so that they would lend to the structural integrity of the hockey stick.

Here’s the original logo that I used to replicate:

You can see that there’s no good way to duplicate those gloves, so I just made a few phalanges-like collections surrounding the stick.

For a quick turn around, I’m happy with it.  There are a few things that I could easily do to improve it, but I’m just starting out to get an idea of where my strengths are naturally and what I will need to work on.

You can watch my flickr feed for more pictures and updates – www.flickr.com/photos/sixf00t4/sets/72157624043323210/