Gray-Scale Mosaics

A few weeks ago I talked about DJBaggadonuts' mosaics, which can be found on flickr and on his own website. He has several interesting techniques. One that particularly interested me was his attempt to make gray-scale mosaics.



The basic idea is that he used differing amounts of transparent plates stacked on top of each other to create lighter or darker shades of color. A tall stack of plates would make a darker color; a shorter stack would make a lighter color. It appears he went through a fairly lengthy trial and error process to figure out how to make this work out. One interesting problem that he encountered was shadows from tall stacks of plates disrupting the clarity of the image. You can read about this process of trial and error on his blog, here and here. The latter entry also includes a very ingenious solution for shaking loose 1x1 round plates onto a baseplate in such a way that you can press another plate down onto them and have them stick 32 at a time.

I think it was this idea of stacking transparent plates to change shades of colors that lead to later attempts of stacking plates in different colors to try to achieve a greater color palette. I plan to examine some of these attempts in the future.

LEGO "LiteBrite"

I love to see all the different creative ways that people come up with to make LEGO mosaics. I heard someone joke about how he was going to show up to BrickCon with a mosaic made entirely out of LEGO tires, and I thought that might not be a bad idea at all.

I see that DJ Baggadonuts has come up with several interesting mosaic techniques. One of them is to stack headlight bricks into columns, and then stick jewels into the holes. Light will shine through from the back of the mosaic, creating an interesting effect. If the backlight is strong enough, it will light up, "sort of like a LEGO LiteBrite," as Mr. Baggadonuts says in his blog. (The blog archive is worth a look; in it you can find links to all sorts of entries explaining how he accomplishes his different mosaics.)

Here are two examples of this jewels-inserted-into-headlight bricks technique:






The stability of the mosaics can cause a problem, as they are made of columns of headlight bricks and have very little cross-bracing (which only occurs in the black sections). But with persistence, it can be done.

Mr. Baggadonuts has several other interesting techniques that I would like to cover in future posts. ;-)

(Yes, yes, I love to use smileys. I can't help it! Everything seems so very serious without them. ;-) )