The LEGO store in Sentosa had unique models and cool sculpture on display, not unlike their other flagship locations such as Rockefeller Center or Disneyland. Though it also had a product for sale that we had never seen anywhere else – a customized face mosaic.
For $160 SGD it came with:
- A 48×48 base plate
- Five boxes of 900 1×1 plates, in yellow, white, light gray, dark gray, and black
- An instruction manual to make the face of your choice, presumably custom-printed from the photo booth in the corner
To say that we were tempted would be an understatement, though the price was a bit steep and it didn’t seem like we could fit the entire family in the photo. Thus we did not end up buying it.
However, I had my mind set to create my own. I had been playing with GIFs since high school and was confident in my ability to pixelate a photo and converting it into a narrow color palette. I could then purchase my own LEGO plates and base plates to create a mosaic of whatever dimension I pleased.
What I entirely underestimated was the cost of loose LEGO pieces, even in bulk. Purchasing them from the official website or through a reseller would set me back way more than the prepackaged set from the store. It’d cost me a fortune to make a decent mosaic of the whole family, and I didn’t think we cared to spend so much on a monochromatic wall art. I considered knock off LEGOs generic building blocks which were cheaper, but it didn’t feel like a satisfactory compromise.
It just so happened that we had bought the kids some mini Perler beads right before the trip. As they made cartoon pictures with these tiny plastic cylinders, it struck me that we could use the same thing to construct mosaic photos as well. A standard 28×28 mini Perler bead template would give us a reasonably detailed face if the 48×48 LEGO base plate could handle two.
Thus we went to work… first by picking out suitable face shots from our vacation:
Then I turned each image into 28×28 pixels and 4-color gray scale plus background:
The hard part was to carefully put the 4,704 white, light gray, dark gray, black, and clear beads in place. These microscopic plastic cylinders were under 3mm wide and required extraordinary focus to handle. We feared that breathing too hard could knock them out of place. The first couple faces took us almost 3 hours each to assemble. As we got the hang of it, we sped up to roughly 2 hours per face.
Xuan made two, I made three, and Hong made the last one. We ironed them flat and the results were great! In terms of being able to make everyone’s face in the same dimension without taking up too much space, we thought this Perler beads project ended up superior to the LEGO version that inspired us in the first place.
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