{ 2010 03 11 }

LEGO Star Wars Mural: 20,000 pieces on a wall, far far away…

Remember the Star Wars Lego mural?

Paul found some software to pixelate images into LEGO colors.  He hacked it up a bit and we played around with photographs and priced out bricks and just generally threw around ideas until late last summer… when Will broke his arm and I painted Luke’s X-wing on Will’s cast. It was clear that having something BIG and STAR WARS would be cool in The Little Man’s room, so Paul decided to tackle the original Star Wars poster. In LEGO. 

All four of us worked on it (yes, Kate, too!) during Saints games. Note to prospective LEGO-mural builders: images with lots of one color (e.g.: black) are excellent for pint-sized helpers. Also, black and white 1×1 bricks are among the cheapest bricks and can be found in bulk.

We finished it awhile back.  And after it sat in boxes for another month or so, we finally decided on how to hang it and got it up on the wall.

Because of the size and weight, we were not thrilled with the idea of permanently adhering it to a board, or putting it within a frame.

Instead, Paul used velcro along a melamine board and then adhered velcro to the back of the base plates.   Once the melamine board was hung on the wall, he began adhering the base plates piece-by-piece, starting at the center.

With 20 10-inch base plates, the entire mural is 40-inches wide and 50-inches high.   There are more than 20,000 1×1 bricks.

While the software provided a pixelated image to work from, we still ended up doing some artistic tweaking. The biggest changes came to Luke and Leia. Flesh tones are difficult in LEGO. Particularly when paired with figures wearing light-colored clothing. We played with an assortment of white, off-white, tan (dark and light) and oranges to get the final picture. Paul bought extra in these colors to accommodate the changes we ended up making.

Here is the final result:

Cool AND geeky.

Posted by holly on Thursday, March 11th, 2010, at 9:29 pm, and filed under Art & Photography.

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