Mosaic is the art of creating images by assembling small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. A photo-mosaic is a modern twist to the classic mosaic; an image made up of small blocks of photographic images, each block an image unto itself.

  A photo-mosaic requires only one original picture but hundreds or even thousands of additional pictures for tiling. The term “tile” is used to describe the individual picture block element that makes up the mosaic image. The beauty of the process is that the original does not have to be of good quality or even hi resolution. The additional images can come from your own image library, font library as well as royalty-free Google or Flickr sources. There are many royalty-free stock libraries available as well.

  The amount of tiles, as well as the shape, can be controlled. You can make up an image using relatively few tiles, let’s say 500, which will produce a course final image. Or you can sharpen the image by adding more tiles, which reduces their size. An adequate number of tiles is approaching 4,000. If we are short of original images I can lighten or darken what we have which usually provides the necessary additional images.

  The shape of the tiles can vary. The most common tile shape is a rectangle, including a square. Other shapes are puzzle pieces and a hexagaon.

  On a more creative note, all or part of the mosaic can be ghosted to allow the original image to show through. This way you can, for example, emphasize someone’s face such as in “The Lizard King” shown above. Kind’a looks like Jim Morrison, don’t it?

  Mosaic Fee:  $100 - $350