Baggadonuts’ LEGO Art

After building the first mosaic and convincing myself that something more ambitious would be worth the effort I set about building the second one. This time I wanted to complete the image but also to try a much larger one. This would mean building not only wider but taller than I had done before but I’ll come back to that. First I want to go into a little more detail about what I built and how I went about. I’ll save the construction for another time.

For lots more pictures of this project please visit the Project Photos gallery here.

To start this project, which is a photo of the other of my two daughters, I started by taking the photo into Photoshop for conversion to black and white and general tweaking. Here’s the original image and some versions I messed around with.
Over time I’ve found it necessary to really boost the contrast and brightness of the images so that the next part of the process works optimally. In this case I adjust the image so that there was a enough contract between the light face and dark hair without losing too much detail in the face.

After I was happy with the image I run it through Pic2Bricks to do the conversion to a mosaic. Photoshop has a filter for this too but Pic2Bricks also does the quantization down to a fixed color palette at the same time and offers more choices of algorithms too. For black and white images I use the Error Diffusion option since it’s designed to reduce images down to two colors.
For the inputs for the size of the image I went with 64 x 96 pixels. This is large enough to capture image detail but wouldn’t generate a mosaic the size of my wall. 96x64 is 3 green baseplate x 2 baseplates.
The figure (left) here shows the Pic2Bricks window with the image and the output displayed. You have to experiment a bit here. I ended up using the “Floyd-Steinberg scanline” method and a Pic2Bricks configuration that approximated the brightness and huge of the materials I was using. You can download this configuration file here.

After generating the mosaic I find it helpful to break up the image into pieces. This is true of 2d mosaics but especially the ones that build vertically like this. I take the image and segment it vertically into groups of 5-6 rows. I found that it was difficult to build more rows at a time than that. Connecting adjacent black blocks together is one way I tried to build in some strength (more on that next time) but in sections with lots of black you can end up building large segments that are difficult to move and install.

That’s it for this installment as we’ve come to the building of the piece and there’s lots to say so I’ll save that for another day. Until next time...