Nov 9, 2012

Creating the Bottlecap Mosaic, Part 1


You may have been wondering about the status of the mysterious bottlecap mural.  I know! I haven’t said much about it in a while. After many months, nay years, progress has been made!  Earlier this spring I had collected about 30K caps, enough to have all the colors I needed.  I spent a lot of time sorting & cataloging the caps, then selected a design. 

I decided to utilize an oriental carpet design because I didn’t want anything that looked too ethnic or strongly geometric.  I scanned this image from a book, cropped it a bit, duplicated it and created a final mosaic design that would be about 6 ‘ tall and about 14’ wide. 



The next step was using the freeware software package Andrea Mosaic. The software was designed to do photomosaics (perhaps you recall their popularity ~10 years ago) and requires a target image and a database of photos from which to recreate the image. 

I photographed each unique cap on a grey background (to simulate adobe), then edited all the images to a square format.  Andrea Mosaic allows you to set how many times an image can be repeated, whether or not the same image can be adjacent, if rotation is acceptable and the graininess of the final mosaic.  


I spent about an hour tweaking settings to give me a mosaic with a good balance of detail and color blending.  The software will break your output into pieces so you can work with smaller sizes (very helpful for large mosaics), so I printed out pages that would correspond to tiles about 10x14 inches.

The tile shown here is typical output and if you look closely you may be able to recognize some of the brands of beer, cider or soda.  The next step was creating the tiles. That was a lot of work and I'll describe the process in the next post


Stay tuned!