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Ascent Stage: How to create a LEGO mosaic

Ascent Stage: How to create a LEGO mosaic

After I got done with my hammer icon, I wanted to create something for the ARCH baby blog (Christy and my initials can be arranged as ARCH and CHAR-we're "CHAR" only if we're in an evil mood, muahaha).

After drawing with Paint Shop for a little, I thought "hey, this'd be cool in Legos!"

So I started up the Lego Creator and made a few designs. Starting with a simple "ARCH" and ending up with a more arch-like design.

The legos reminded me of bitmaps, of course, so out of curiosity I googled "lego dithering." I wanted to at least consider, if not really create, how detailed a lego logo (hehe) I could make.

The search pulled up this lego mosaic blog entry. Great stuff (was that first comment ["dude, you're killing me"] an inside joke, a compliment, or one-upsmanship, I can't tell)! I searched for dithering instead of anti-aliasing because the basic lego colors aren't close enough in color tones to pull it off.

I tested it on our dog Mocha and tried a few options. I guess I'll need to get the starting plate and the legos!


Which version do you like?







Source image was this one:






Some notes about creating the bitmaps...
  • The extreme close-up and crop increases the resolution for Mocha's face. Otherwise, if I did more of the picture, less detail would be seen for his features

  • I had to modify the instructions (much thanks to blog Ascent State's author John Tolva for the inspiration) to Paint Shop Pro.

  • Mainly Effects > Distortion Effects > Pixelate instead of Mosaic, setting block width and height ("cell size") to 10

  • I wasn't sure how to make a custom pallete, so I just decreased the color depth to 6 colors and then changed it to gray scale.

  • View > Grid shows the grid in Paintshop


  • You can get help counting the colors by using view > palletes > histogram to see the colors. Normally the historgram would be used to tell if your picture's distribution of colors or contrast was correct at a glance. In this case, we can actually count how many lego pieces we need!
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