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. 

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:

And now, the reason why these topics have a picture of a smiling kitten next to them.  No matter how down I am, I’ve never been able to spend a few minutes on http://icanhascheezburger.com/ without feeling better and laughing.  I don’t even like cats that much, but I’ll be darn if those pictures aren’t some of the funniest and cutest things I’ve ever seen.  It’s a tool of mine, whenever I’m said, go take a look at I can haz cheezburger.