[MOC] Sword and Shield Mosaic - The Legend of Zelda

[Vorkosigan]

Inspired by the new LEGO Art line, I made a mosaic of my own. It is based on part of the box art for The Legend of Zelda - A Link to the Past. Images below, followed by an explanation of how I developed the design using GIMP (open source equivalent to photoshop). 

 

This is the source of the artwork. This shield is not as widely seen as the Ocarina of Time blue shield which became the standard, but I like the more classical color scheme. 

Below is a progression of images showing how the design was developed. The steps are as follows:

1. Original image, cropped, and with some areas that were covered by the Z cloned to visible areas on the other half of the shield. I didn't fully fix up the shield because I realized it was not worth the effort, it would be edited at the lower resolution anyway.
2. Reduced resolution image, at the size I intended to use: 36 pixels wide by 74 tall.
3. Indexed color image. This is a function in GIMP made for old style limited color space GIFs and similar. You can define a palette of colors and then convert the image to what most closely matches for each pixel. This allows you to define a palette of available LEGO colors that you want to use and see what it would look like if converted directly. Probably more useful for a photograph like the Beatles art sets, but a good function to have.
4. Final concept design. I ended up redrawing most of the image pixel by pixel to make the design more stylized and representative in only a handful of colors. I used Light Gray, Dark Gray, Flat Silver, Pearl Gold, Black, Reddish Brown, and Dark Red. 
5. The resulting LEGO mosaic. I am mostly happy with it came out, but continue to debate if the black line to the right of the sword was a good choice. It is meant to represent a shadow from the sword being in front of the shield. Note I also made the sword one plate higher than the shield for a slight depth effect. 

Lastly the below image shows a histogram of the colors of the final concept (step 4 above) in GIMP. This is useful for counting the number of pixels in each color. In this example I am highlighting Pearl Gold, and see there are 483 tiles needed. 

Thanks for looking, comments appreciated!