Travelling Man

Time for another project! I got this motivation from a photo I set up in Wisconsin.

With an original picture of 965 x 680 (cropped), I formed a LEGO model in Photoshop.

I only had a limited quantity of LEGO bricks left from the last project, so I got started with those, then ordered a new round of bricks. I got some great deals, but since I had to buy so many parts, it still ended up costing a few hundred bucks and change.

I used relative counting to set in the light gray bricks once I ran out of other colors, and stopped when I was out of bricks. This is a shot of the progress.

This breaks down to LEGO bricks at 193 x 136, which means that using the 48 x 48 plates, I'd have three rows of four plates.

I will have to trim four pixels from the image (to account for the borders) and add six rows to the top of the image, so it will fit in the frame correctly, but this looks to be a great layout- much easier than the last project to have them all on big plates, not big and little plates combined.

As you can see, things are going along quite well. I'm now covered head to toe with LEGO bricks and can objectively look at the tones from a distance to determine if I want to make my boots or hat darker black.

As it turned out, the lack of detail (or amount of shadow) on my face here almost give me a rugged, cowboy look, which works out perfectly. Couldn't be happier with this, as I'm not the main focus of this piece. No. Really.

This whole piece suggests a theme of conquering the road, the feeling of freedom and exhiliration of travelling. We have a beautiful country, and looking upon this piece, when it is complete, I hope to remind myself of that daily.

I spent the whole day working on this bottom-left square. In doing so, I did some timing to see what the work entailed. Below is what I figured out.

It took an hour and 45 minutes to place 1,000 bricks. That's 6300 seconds, or at 1,000 bricks, it's 6.3 seconds per brick. finding the right color, finding where it belongs, popping it in, straightening it out)

With 2,304 bricks per square, that's 4.032 hours per square. And it's very tiring to do a whole square- I'd factor in an hour or two to rest if I had to go straight through in a day and do this.

So, with 12 squares in this image, I can comfortably say it'll take 48 hours at the very earliest to complete this piece.

You know what? I don't think I need to extend this mosaic anymore to the left than it already is. Sure, I wanted a really big LEGO mosaic, but really- the balance of this one is good on its own. This section of me just standing along the car is perfectly balanced in the frame, and on its own looks like a perfect LEGO mosaic.

Why go to the trouble of making the rest of it look like my car? I don't really have wall space for it anyhow.

I think I'm going to leave it the way it is. I like the way it is a lot. So there. Bam!

I did some work this past evening, framing the piece and mounting it. (this time, the board wouldn't be seen, but I needed a stable base)

The base wasn't ideal, but not having a larger vehicle, I couldn't get a backboard home. I brought a 1/4" thick sheet that is a half-cut version of the full deal. The reason the base isn't ideal is that it doesn't extend to the full corner of each plate. There is a 3" overhang all around.

This is going to make it hard to store, hard to set down, and hard to transport...I haven't quite figured out how to deal with that yet. (nice thing is, I haven't needed to.)

With this LEGO mosaic complete, I sat back and took a look from the couch. This is exactly how I wanted it to look. I wanted it to remind me of my road trips, without it being a giant portrait of me. There's too little detail to identify it as being me. I'm not big on vanity, so this is a perfectly subtle reminder of all the fun I've had out on the road.

Looks good, if I do say so myself.