So, I managed to finish a decent sized piece of this mosaic so I thought it wold be a good time to see how it was going to look back lit.  It looks fairly good lying down with the white table or carpet behind it but it’s supposed to be light from behind like a LiteBrite™.  This meant I had to figure out how to stand it upright which was going to be tricky since, while fairly strong with the 1x2 plates behind them, a wall of 1x1 bricks - well, strong it isn’t.

    The picture to the right shows the back of the piece with all of the 1x2 plates linking the 1x1’s together.  The idea was that there’d be at least 1 plate linking one column of 6 bricks with the next - the stagger of the plates guaranteed that.  Looks pretty and believe it or not you can pick up the entire piece as one - if you’re very careful.  I’ve already had to rebuild a chunk when I wasn’t paying attention and bumped it into something.

   

Having learned a lesson or two from the first big 3D mosaic I decided to build the support with much more front-to-back stability than before.  The idea being that this would prevent the piece rocking over forward or backwards as v1.0 is prone to do.  I took three 32x16 base plates, laid them out, join them together with some 4x12 plates and began to build two support towers upwards.  Between the two towers, my plan was to build three free standing columns that would be linked somehow together - and to the two side towers.

    The big challenge with the towers in the middle is that they must be totally transparent and not obstruct the back light.  I decided to use 1x6x5 wall panels which are huge, stiff, and very transparent [and expensive! Darn!]. I also used 1x2 transparent

bricks, 1x2x2 wall panels, and 1x2 and 1x1 plates.  I got the towers pretty high as you can see but then I ran into trouble.  The green base plates were too flexible and eventually modifying one side of the thing would cause bits on the other side to pop loose.  Rather than press on I tore the whole thing down and decided to

build a stiffer and stronger baseplate myself.

The pictures to the right show the basic construction using a frame of 4x12 plates which are covered with 4x12 plates and then by a layer of 6x6 gray

plates.  I also used the 6x6’s on the back for extra strength.  The result is a dark gray 76x48 base plate! It looks very impressive.  Too bad LEGO doesn’t just sell one! :) 

The picture (left) shows the finished product.

With the base plate situation taken care of I began to rebuild the two towers and the three in the middle - all those transparent pieces. The frame was starting to be the major part of building this mosaic!