Picture Mosaic - Putting your Page together in Pieces

Picture Mosaic – create fantastic borders or turn the entire photograph into a picture mosaic for the focal point of your page. The basic way to do it is to gather together a paper trimmer and some adhesive materials to turn into borders, mats, or even backgrounds for tiles, journaling or other snapshots. Get really creative and just use the scissors to cut your pictures up in waves or vertical and horizontal lines, squares and so on.

First, select a picture with a scene or a favorite person. Be sure to have a copies on hand in case you are unhappy with the results. Second, using a paper trimmer or a craft knife (or even a good pair of scissors), cut your photograph into uniform squares. Three, reassemble the photo on cardstock, adhering with tabs, glue stick, etc. and leaving some space around each piece.

A variation would be to leave the main subject of the picture intact and trim the background into squares for a mosaic border. Change it up by tilting or using foam tape to elevate some of the pieces.

Charm and Beauty

You can also create a picture mosaic using a computer program. A few such programs have been mentioned in various articles, such as Paint Shop Pro, the PicArtia site, as well as open source programs such as GIMP. I chose this last one to play around with. I chose a picture from our honeymoon from when we walked through a portion of Fern Canyon in Northern California. The first photo will be the original and the second will be the mosaic.

Fern Canyon Original

These are the steps I took to make a picture mosaic using the GIMP program on my computer.

1. Start GIMP. (Download the program first if you don’t have it).

2. Click File>Open. Browse your hard drive for the picture you’d like to make into a picture mosaic.

3. Under “Tiling Primitives,” select squares, hexagons, octagons and squares, or triangles. Look in the window above for a preview of your mosaic picture.

4. Move the top four tile sliders to the right to make the mosaic tiles larger, taller, spaced farther apart and less neat. You can also move the picture tiles to the left to make them smaller, shorter, spaced closer together and neater.

5. On the right, select whether you would like anti-aliasing, color averaging, tile splitting, pitted surfaces and foreground or background lighting. For my project, I noted that the tile splitting and color averaging were marked.

6. Continue checking the preview window to see your changes. Click the move icon in the lower right hand corner of the preview window and drag your mouse to preview a different part of your image.

7. Click “OK” when you are satisfied with your picture mosaic. Save your image with a new filename to preserve the original.

Each program and website has it’s own steps in how you can use them to make your digital picture mosaic. If you have or can afford one of these other programs, this is good, but, if, like me, you don’t have one of these, then try out GIMP or a similar open source program as it is free to use. Of course, if you wish, you can give them a donation if you are pleased with it’s usability.

You can create as many digital picture mosaics as you like. Print your picture mosaics, put them on your website, or use them as desktop wallpaper on your computer and have fun!!

Picture Mosaic - Putting your Page together in Pieces

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