Some of the official LEGO stores have a feature called the LEGO Mosaic Maker. It’s basically a photo booth where your picture gets turned into a LEGO mosaic. Once you get your picture taken, you get printed instructions for building your mosaic, as well as the #40179 LEGO Personalized Mosaic Portrait set, which includes 4,502 pieces (900 of each of black, dark-gray, light-gray, white, and yellow 1×1 plates, a 48×48 stud baseplate, and a brick-separator). The LEGO Mosaic Maker has been very popular with LEGO fans, especially families with children. It’s a fun and interactive experience to go through the booth and then finally being able to build your own customized mosaic. If you would like to check which LEGO stores have a LEGO Mosaic maker, you can find a full list at the LEGO Mosaic Maker page.

If you don’t have a LEGO store with a LEGO Mosaic Maker near you, or you don’t have a LEGO store near you at all, there is great news! LEGO recently created an online version of the experience that anyone can use. How this works is that you go to the LEGO Mosaic Maker page, agree to the terms and conditions, and upload your image.

The software will turn your image into a mosaic after just a few seconds. In fact, it will actually give you six different versions, so you can choose the one you like the best. You can even make further adjustments; how much the image is zoomed in, the position of the person(s) on the image, and the contrast. Once you’re happy with your mosaic, you will be prompted to save the image to your computer. This image is going to be your pattern to build your mosaic. You can either print it out, or if you have a large enough screen, you can follow along directly from your computer.

If you already have the #40179 LEGO Personalized Mosaic Portrait set, you can begin building right away. If you don’t have the set, but you do have a 48×48 stud baseplate and lots of 1×1 plates, you can still use LEGO Mosaic Makes to design your own mosaics. And if you would like to purchase the set, you can do so via the LEGO Mosaic Maker page of the Online LEGO Shop.

As mentioned above, the #40179 LEGO Personalized Mosaic Portrait set comes with 4,502 pieces. This includes 900 of each of black, dark-gray, light-gray, white, and yellow 1×1 plates, a 48×48 stud baseplate, and a brick-separator. This gives you enough options to build any mosaic generated by the LEGO Mosaic Maker. Whenever you want to rebuild your mosaic, just go back to the LEGO Mosaic Maker page, upload another image, make the desired adjustments, print out the instruction page, and begin building.

Another great benefit of the online version of the LEGO Mosaic Maker is that you can use any image you like, not just the one you take at the photo booth. So, if you want to make a mosaic of your pet, or a picture from your childhood, you can use those too. Keep in mind that according to the terms and conditions, no trademarks or copyrighted material may be used. Only images that you have the rights to use may be submitted.

The #40179 LEGO Personalized Mosaic Portrait costs $129.99. This is not a bad price for parts you get, but remember that you’re limited to a mostly grayscale mosaic. If you would like to make a more colorful mosaic, you might consider the LEGO Arts sets, which come with a large number of 1×1 round plates or 1×1 round tiles, and then use an app like LEGO Art Remix to pixelate the image and generate instructions. (We talked about LEGO Art Remix here: Building Custom LEGO Mosaics with LEGO Arts Sets). You can find all the currently available LEGO Art mosaics at the LEGO Art section of the Online LEGO Shop.

What do you think? Did you ever use LEGO Mosaic Maker at a LEGO store? How did you like the experience? And what do you think of the online version? Feel free to share your thoughts and discuss in the comment section below!

And you might also like to check out the following related posts:

• Building Custom LEGO Mosaics with LEGO Arts Sets
• Brick Breakdown: LEGO Art Iron Man Mosaic