Blue Man Group is a great show with high quality audio-visual entertainment. If you have not seen it, go check it out. You can also buy their music at the venue, which I can only highly recommend. Make sure you take your camera and take a picture with the Blue man after the show.

I have finished the month long LEGO portrait project, the result is up on the wall at home and on the blupark.net Web gallery (Project: LEGO portrait).

In short, I took a picture that seemed perfect for the project. I used GIMP to edit the picture, sort of optimise it for LEGO (reduce colors, sharpen the edges, etc…). I used a LEGO portrait specific application – Bricksaic by Bob Kojima – to generate the LEGO output. I loaded the results from Bricksaic into LDraw to do further improvements and optimisation on the bricks. I printed a bill of material (BOM) for the LEGO pieces, then went off to the Bricklink stores to buy the pieces. I ended up buying from 5 different stores and from a local LEGO store. I could buy all the pieces from LEGO Factory, but that would have cost 5 times the price. Once the pieces arrived I followed the drawing from LDraw to place the bricks on the plates. The last task was to “simply” mount the picture on the wall.

A few statistics: the picture is made from 5068 pieces, it weighs 5kg, it is 76cm by 76cm in size, 96 by 96 bricks, and it took about a month to finish with a lot of delays and long breaks.

There are a few really nice projects on the Web about LEGO mosaics, pictures and similar projects. Here is one with a lot of useful details and instructions that helped with my project: DarthVader Lego mosaic or Starry Night LEGO Mosaic.
Believe it or not, there are people making a living out of such work, like this dude: http://www.seankenney.com/ or this company http://brickworkz.com/