After I got done with my hammer icon, I wanted to create something for the ARCH baby blog (Christy and my initials can be arranged as ARCH and CHAR-we're "CHAR" only if we're in an evil mood, muahaha).
After drawing with Paint Shop for a little, I thought "hey, this'd be cool in Legos!"
So I started up the Lego Creator and made a few designs. Starting with a simple "ARCH" and ending up with a more arch-like design.
The legos reminded me of bitmaps, of course, so out of curiosity I googled "lego dithering." I wanted to at least consider, if not really create, how detailed a lego logo (hehe) I could make.
The search pulled up this lego mosaic blog entry. Great stuff (was that first comment ["dude, you're killing me"] an inside joke, a compliment, or one-upsmanship, I can't tell)! I searched for dithering instead of anti-aliasing because the basic lego colors aren't close enough in color tones to pull it off.
I tested it on our dog Mocha and tried a few options. I guess I'll need to get the starting plate and the legos!
Which version do you like?
Source image was this one:
Some notes about creating the bitmaps...
- The extreme close-up and crop increases the resolution for Mocha's face. Otherwise, if I did more of the picture, less detail would be seen for his features
- I had to modify the instructions (much thanks to blog Ascent State's author John Tolva for the inspiration) to Paint Shop Pro.
- Mainly Effects > Distortion Effects > Pixelate instead of Mosaic, setting block width and height ("cell size") to 10
- I wasn't sure how to make a custom pallete, so I just decreased the color depth to 6 colors and then changed it to gray scale.
- View > Grid shows the grid in Paintshop
You can get help counting the colors by using view > palletes > histogram to see the colors. Normally the historgram would be used to tell if your picture's distribution of colors or contrast was correct at a glance. In this case, we can actually count how many lego pieces we need!
Found another guide and a tool that can help.
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