Building the “Ai” Mosaic
We love the look of chinese characters, and putting them into a Lego Mosaic sounded like it would look great. For the Generations Adoptions Hope Gala, we have wanted to submit something made of Lego for the silent auction for several years, but couldn’t get anything together for it. But this year, we put the chinese character for ‘love’ in a Lego Mosaic… and voila, we have an auction item!
First, I designed the picture itself. I used the internet, a draw program and a photo editing program to get what I wanted and in the color I wanted. I’m not a graphic designer, so I didn’t do anything too complicated.
I found a calligraphy “ai” that I liked, and inserted it into my draw program. I use LibreOffice, and it has served me well for many years. I decided on a font for the English “Love” and with a text box, moved it around till I had the layout I liked. For a simple Lego mosaic, you want a square as many of the baseplates are square. The level of detail is important, remember you are limited by the layout of studs and the number of studs.
Here is a look at a couple different sizes:
We’ve been doing our mosaics thus far in 48×48 studs, which is about 15 inches square. This seems to give a nice balance of level-of-detail and overall-cost.
I found the best way to play with color was with a photo editing software. Yeah, I’m a freebie kind of gal, and I use Picasa. I found in the 2nd tab over in the photo editing a feature called “duo tone”. I could set the first color and the second color, change brightness, contrast and fade to get what I wanted. I tried several colors, and settled on the blue.
I tried using Paint, where I used the bucket to fill a whole area. But I found that Paint had shading and pixelating where I didn’t want any, and to fill it all in was going to take a good bit of time and require me to fix it at a very zoomed in level so I didn’t mess with the area of the character or lettering.
Next time, how I made it into a Lego mosaic!
