If you've looked around at the LEGO fan sites and some of the photo streams, you're bound to have seen some mosaic MOCs. If you haven't seen any of them, you can see a few of the record holding mosaic creations at this site. I fully admit that I am not artistic enough to build one on my own, but I have looked into some of the free software options online. If you do a search for 'LEGO Mosaic Software' there are a few sites that will let you submit a picture, tweak it, and then will spit out instructions and a piece count. From my limited experience, most of them need specific types of pictures and have a hard time turning pictures with details or certain color schemes into LEGO brick mosaics.

Well Bricklink just recently released their version of brick building mosaic software called Mosaick (and since I'm promoting them, here is a promotion for the Bricks for Bricks Bricklink Store). Why are they doing this? Well Bricklink is a great place to get bricks and you can find about all of the bricks ever made out there. So why not build a software that encourages people to buy bricks. Then of course when you buy bricks from someone who sells on Bricklink, they get to charge their fee and make money. How does this version stack up? Here is a quick example of how Mosaick worked using a pretty detailed picture.

I am into aviation (despite not doing a lot of builds related to that area) and specifically fighter jets. So here is picture of a formation of F-35s.

To use Mosaick, you don't have to download anything. All you do is drag and drop the picture file that you want to use onto the website. Easy! I took the F-35 picture and dropped it in.

The first task is to figure out how you want to set up your mosaic. My options for this picture were square, 4x3, 3x2, and 5x3. Having messed with the software some, different pictures give you other options and some will let you customize it. Square lets you move a square around the picture to select what you want to do. For this case, I picked the 5x3 aspect ratio just to see what it would come out like. The first was 25x15 inches or 80x48 studs (or 2.5x1.5 standard sized LEGO base plates assuming a standard sized base plate is 32x32 studs) in color using plates.

It's not super detailed, but you can tell what the picture is for the most part. And for a little over $1,800 you can buy all the parts to make this through Bricklink (yikes!).

Okay, so money is no issue for you. You just want a super cool mosaic built from LEGO plates. How about 75x45 inches or 240x144 studs(7.5x4.5 standard baseplates). In my opinion, this looks awesome! Wow! Considering how detailed the original picture is, this definitely captures it... granted it is huge, but that's another story. And for over $16,000, you can buy the parts right away!

Just for fun, you can also grey scale the picture. Same size as the previous one, but obviously less colors. As you can see the one aircraft on the bottom left is hard to see, but the details are mostly there. Given that the parts are mostly dark and light grey with some black and white, the price comes down substantially to ~$1,500.

If you've looked at the pictures I've posted or into Mosaick itself, you've seen that you can choose plates, tiles, or bricks. This obviously will adjust the price based on what parts are available and the colors of those parts. So again the same picture with the same dimensions, but back in color, this time in tiles. The picture looks almost the same and the cost goes down from ~$16,000 to ~$7,500. To me it looks like the detail is still there.

Same picture again, but with bricks. This one brings the price to just under $4,000. Again, it still looks just as detailed to me.

Also, I took the picture down a size so now it is 50x30 inches or 160x96 studs (5x3 standard baseplates). This brings down the cost to ~$1,800 with bricks. The detail isn't as good, but I still think it looks pretty sharp.

So failure on my part... I didn't capture any of the piece counts or numbers of separate colors. I did however save a version of the instructions. You have the option to print, but I think using a computer would probably be easier when it comes time to build. Tracking where you're at would be a challenge for a mosaic this big though. I'm sure you could come up with a good method though.

Whew! If you've made it down this far, I'm curious to know what you think. Have you messed with Mosaick at all? Has anyone actually built anything? I think that the key is to try the different methods out to see how you can keep the detail in your picture while keeping the parts cost lower. Overall, I think Mosaick is the best LEGO brick mosaic software I have ever seen. It's only in beta version so hopefully the Bricklink team will continue to make it better. I'm excited to see what happens with this tool and I look forward to someday having the time a bricks to build a giant mosaic for my wall.