Mosaic Designs

I know I have talked about this in my tshirt design post, but being a graphic designer means that I end up applying my professional skillset to my LEGO hobby as well. This time I am going to show some LEGO mosaics that I have designed for Bendigo LEGO User Group events.

One of the activities that my local LUG runs throughout the year for various community events are large scale community LEGO mosaic builds. Basically this means that we have a stock of LEGO bricks in 30 colours, hundreds of 16×16 plates (one for each community member who takes part) and a purpose built trailer with hydraulic lifting side covered in baseplates to create a giant canvas for these community artworks to be assembled, displayed and transported.

We have perfected the system we use for running these community builds over many years, and one of my roles is that I sometimes get to design concepts for the artwork of the mosaics. Below are a few examples of mosaics that I have designed over the last couple of years.

This is the first mosaic that I designed for Bendigo LEGO User Group and some of the lessons learned on this mosaic have informed future designs. The mosaic features a farmer minifig and a horserider minifig standing on the arena at the Prince of Wales Showgrounds in Bendigo with a blue healer, a cow, a sheep and a rooster. In the background you can see a silhouette of a ferris wheel and tents/marquees with fireworks overhead. The Bendigo Agricultural Show logo is featured in a giant first prize ribbon.

1. Bendigo Agricultural Show 2024 Mosaic Concept
2. Bendigo Agricultural Show 2024 Mosaic Complete

This one was pretty quick to design as Bloom – Bendigo’s spring festival – is all about tulips. My first concept was to create some tulips made from LEGO bricks, this was presented to the client as an idea and they approved it straight away.

There were a few challenges with this mosaic when it came to the assembly as we did not load the trailer with enough of our medium azure bricks so some of the later sections were completed in medium blue bricks and as you can no doubt see in the completed image, some of the sections of the stem of the last tulip have not been placed correctly.

1. Tulips Mosaic Concept
2. Tulips Mosaic Complete

For the Bendigo Easter Festival 2024 we ran two mosaic activities over the Friday and Saturday of the Easter long weekend so I got to design two mosaics, one for each day. The idea of having an Easter Bunny for the first mosaic was suggested by Bendigo LEGO User Group committee member Ben Luddington and the idea of having a Chinese dragon for the second mosaic was suggested by Bendigo LEGO User Group committee member Michael Peebles. We made a conscious decision to choose a different colour palette for each day’s mosaic so that we did not run our stocks of any particular colour too low. These two mosaics are personally the favourites that I have designed to date.

1. Day 1 Happy Easter Mosaic Concept
2. Day 1 Happy Easter Mosaic Complete
3. Day 2 Happy Year of the Dragon Mosaic Concept
4. Day 2 Happy Year of the Dragon Mosaic Complete