Mosaic Portraits

Mariann Asanuma (Model Gal) recently completed her first mosaic portrait of a real person.  At the size of 1 square foot, it's pretty small, but still containing lots of detail:

 

 

She wrote a lot about the design process on her Model Building Secrets blog. 

 

 

Dave Shaddix also recently completed a mosaic of a person, which is, as he describes it, "A 20" x 20" mosaic commissioned by a very loving grandmother to commemorate her grandson's senior year of high school and amazing last season!"

 

 

This mosaic is a bit more stylized, but still gives me a great impression of a football player in action.

Convention-al Mosaics

Mariann Asanuma has a mosaic-filled post on her blog, ModelBuildingSecrets.  She describes everything so well on her site that it would be redundant to do it again here.  So -- go check it out! 

I Scream for Ice Cream Mosaics!

I probably should have included this in the previous post, but Mariann Asanuma (Model Gal) also brought her ice cream truck to show at BrickCon. It has a different mosaic on each side, so as to represent both names that the ice cream company uses. Once again I'm really interested in the bricks going at different angles so as to increase the amount of detail possible in such a small space.






And since we're on the topic of Mariann's mosaics, here is another small one that uses five different shades of blue to create the impression of a Wyland ocean painting:



When Mariann writes about this picture in her blog, she talks about how she has to simplify the details in order to make it come out correctly. I hope she won't mind me quoting her wholesale here, but here is the paragraph:

"And here’s a Model Building Tip for you: Generally when I am doing a mosaic, especially when it is small like this one, I have to simplify the image and take away some of the details without losing the general look. Trying to do all the lines or shadings is almost impossible at this size, so you have to pick and choose what you keep in and what you take out. Sometimes that is easier to say than do. "

I'm not really sure how to accomplish these kinds of detailed mosaics like Mariann does; it might be worth asking her about sometime. ;-)

Remembering 9/11

This post is a bit late in coming, but better late than never, right? I was able to attend BrickCon in Seattle for a day, and got to see lots of cool mosaics. The winning mosaic in the large category was called "Remembering 9/11" by Mariann Asanuma (Model Gal).




I'm very impressed by the complicated techniques used to render this image. There are plates and bricks heading in all sorts of directions, which allows a greater amount of detail to be used. Mariann said this took her 100 hours to make this, and I'm not surprised.

I first saw this mosaic on Mariann's blog, Model Building Secrets. You can find her original write-up on it here.