Girl With Hair Ribbon

It was time to do something different with my Lego World Map set (31203). I looked at the Lego Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe set (31197) first. The World Map tiles have ten colors, but the bulk is white and blue/green (building all 4 Marilyn’s impossible).

I then realized there is another color available: black (a place without a tile), So I started to look for a suitable art piece..and found the “Girl with Hair Ribbon”, a 1965 painting by Roy Lichtenstein. I also liked it because it has the Lego primary color scheme.

Creating a mosaic

There are several online tools that help you to convert an image into a mosaic. Basically I tested them all, but one by one they have a limitation (for my purpose).

I then found that Bricklink Studio has an “Mosaic” option! And a very good one. Even with size 48×48 there was an impressive result. In order to get some details better I ended up with 96×96 (my limit with the number of ground plates from the World Maps set).

The only problem: Studio ignores the red dots; it generates the skin all white. Initially I thought of a simple red-white-red-white etc pattern, but it soon became clear that that is too much. So I had to find a better pattern…

So I ended up writing a Python program that translates the image into a 96×96 pattern with a custom “make_skin_mask” function to fiddle with various dot patterns.

Colors

As mentioned above the World Map comes with a lot (light)blue and (3 flavors of) green. Red is critical import in the image, so I ordered red tiles. The hair is a mix of two colors (from the World map set). Wrong if you look at the original, but it gives a ‘dotted’ effect, which is nice. Originally I used pink for the lips, green for the area right and tan tiles for the white area on the girls face. Not totally happy with that I decided to stay with the original (and buy more red)

Possible improvements

I used the round white plates from my World Map set. Obviously they do not give a flat surface. For the white in the eye’s I did use white tiles. I did not use any black tile. I am not sure if it would change much. Especially from a distance (see the office wall picture).

Video

Do you want to learn more about this fabulous image? There is a great video on Youtube: https://youtu.be/zZSW1XYQj9E?si=LYKpZ8oZZCzj25zy

[Ingezonden als Lego idee, echter de limiet is 5.000 stukjes, en daar zit ik ruim overheen. Dit is dus een unieke “1 van 1” geworden!]