For the 2012 Calgary Expo, I wanted to attempt to replicate some line art/sketches. I started my search by looking at comic book artists, and their Con sketches. i found a few that were pretty interesting, but nothing that inspired me. So I decided to branch out in to black and white art. One of favorites is Brian Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series. My good friend Rob turned me on to the series, and I’m crazy about it. I found a picture that worked really well.

And I set to work. For this mosaic, the amount of detail, and the incremental nature of the guitar strings made it necessary to do this as what we call a “studs up” mosaic. With mosaics, you can have the top of the brick pointing at you as you look (studs “out”), or have top of the brick facing upward (you’re looking at the side of the bricks). The main advantage to the studs up mosaic is that you can use plates (1/3 width of a brick), which allows you get more detail in. the main disadvantage is that it’s MUCH more laborious than a studs-ups mosaic. You have to build from the bottom, there are more stability and connection issues. In general, I find it to be much more “fiddly”, and not so much to my liking. There are great works out there that are studs up, but I’m not a fan of making them.

Anyways, this is how it turned out.

And here’s another shot on a table, to give you some size perspective.

Brian Lee O’Malley saw the mosaic on Twitter, and he thought it was interesting, but didn’t get all excited about it. Not Adam Baldwin excited, anyways.