How to Make Mosaic Portraits

Mosaic portraits make great presents, school projects and tributes to your friends and family. Use a favorite portrait, and get creative when choosing the colors and materials for your mosaic. Change the size of the mosaic pieces you use to adjust the difficulty of the project. Start by following these steps.

Things You'll Need

• Portrait
• Copy machine
• Liquid cement
• Mosaic materials

Instructions

1. Start with a basic portrait. Use a photograph or drawing you can easily enlarge on a copy machine.

2. Enlarge the portrait until you see large pixels in your image. The size of your pixels will be the size of your mosaic pieces, so you can choose how big or small they are.

3. Cut up all your mosaic pieces. Use poster board, catalogs, magazines, colored papers or any other materials you want to work with. Make sure you have a variety of colors and sizes available. The larger the mosaic pieces, the easier the project will be.

4. Glue your enlarged portrait to a piece of poster board or canvas with liquid cement.

5. Work in sections if you want to keep track of your progress; you can mark off portions of the untiled portrait with a marker.

6. Find the pieces you want to use for each section. Try to cover each pixel of the enlarged portrait with a different mosaic piece. Glue the pieces down one at a time until you cover the entire portrait.

Tips & Warnings

• You could also do this project with mosaic tiles instead of paper materials.

• If you choose to make your portrait black and white, use gray-scale mosaic pieces from newspaper print, cardboard or other objects.