Algorithmic Mosaic

Turning a painting into a mosaic piece using Java and Computer Aided Design software.

The original painting to the right and the finished mosaic piece to the left

Inspired by danish modern artist: Carl Henning Pedersen I wanted to transfer a oil painting into mosaic. In order to know where to place the glass tiles on the piece I wrote two java algorithms using processing.

One algorithm would isolate specific colors and get the contour of them.

The second algorithm would turn the original image into tiles and assign a color to the tile based on the pixel value from the original image.

Color isolation and contour is seen on the image to the left, while the image on the right shows the original piece turned into tiles with a letter in each tile representing the color.

The contour of certain colors were imported to vectorworks where tiles would be added to follow the contour path. The intention was to break with the grid structure of the image and locate tiles with respect to their original position. Also, Vectorworks was used to resize tiles, margins etc. to fit my mosaic glass.

The contour of a colorshape and the finalized grid. The grid would provide guidelines about where to position tiles and which colors to choose.

From here it was manual labor attaching the glass. The following shows a few images of the finished piece:

Original oil painting to the right and the finished mosaic piece to the left.

More detailed information about the project can be found in my blogpost.