Blog of Josh Hall

I’m a part of Steel City LUG, and we’re displaying at LEGO KidsFest this weekend, so I wanted to put together something special for it.  I was imbued by the Batman/Joker of Arthur Gugick, who was inspired by Christopher Doyle’s Dorian Bley.  I originally had a different idea, but it was my wife that came up with the more kid appropriate Harry Potter – Voldemort pairing.  Might still do that other idea eventually…

I used the same planning method as I did with the Pittsburgh Pirates mosaic, where I exported the output from special software to Excel to print of special paint-by-number like instructions for each of the 4 32×32 stud plates.  Every other column corresponds to either Harry or Voldemort, so we placed 4,096 1×1 cheese slopes back to back.  Once all the pieces were placed, it takes a lot of time to critique and manipulate the image to its optimal presentation.

The biggest challenge for this one was scale.  If you look back at Arthur’s, they’re much larger.  With mosaics, the larger they are, or the more pieces you can fit in, the higher the overall resolution, which means the easier it is to get a better looking image.  Of course, the larger it is, the more money you have to spend on pieces.  I decided on this scale because it wasn’t cost prohibitive, but I also felt confident that we’d be able to tweak the images enough to pull off a great display.

It took about 30 labor hours to put this all together over the past month or so.  Jordan Otto, Matt Redfield, Ryan Duchene, and my Wife, Kallie, all were part of the design, time, and tweaking.

Here’s a video of the transition:

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Tags: art, harry potter, hp, kids, kidsfest, LEGO, lenticular, lug, mosaic, pittsburgh, steel city lug, voldemort