Sometimes people ask me why do I make emoticon arts for money and why it takes so much time, when there is Mosaticon "that makes all the work for you". This is simply not true. Most of the time the generation result is unsatisfactory.

Mosaticon image generator is a great tool for simple pictures with basic shapes, and sometimes it can be helpful just at the start. It can help you to get the overall shape or the basic idea of emoticon colors usage, so you can spend some hours on corecting it by replacing each emoticon one by one to make it look better. But when the model picture is very detailed, contain lots of smooth color transitions and many different curves, the generation result will not help you at all.

Example for this guide is the Grey Knight from Warhammer 40000 game. Model picture was choosen by client, and it looks like this:

After uploading the image to Mosaticon, this is what we get:


Changing the Mode and Quality settings does not make it any better. The result is blurry and unrecognisable. The sword on the bottom left looks nothing more than a bar of light and does not make any sense. The skull on the head is just a brown amorphic shape. You are not sure if the knight have any eyes and where they are.

This will not be any good base of the shape. The character count is over 13000, and generator used so many different emoticons that client would not be able to buy them. Working on that, by replacing emoticons would be sisyphean and the satisfactory result could never come.

Decision - make it "by hand" from the start.

First we need a basic shape. After some consultation, client agreed to have only the helmet of the knight. Most of the time, the best way is to make it recognisable and pleasant to look at is to make it symmetrical.

Most neuralgic points need to be carefully choosed, and placed after counting emoticons for the exact symmetry. In this example it was the center axis, tips of eyes and some skull elements.

First and most important thing was to determine the shape of the eyes. I also started to "paint" the skull, and the golden ring of the armor. gave them too much attention at this point, and this is not the proper way of doing it (the picture have to be equally balanced on each state), but nobody is perfect.

I also placed all the emoticons that could be helpfull on the bottom. That gives better overview on which emoticon will fit in certain situations

Comming closer to good eye shape and glow. Adding some basic shading to the helmet, to make it appear more round, and starting some details to the front of the helmet's visor.

Filling the helmet with fuller shading and lighting, using many different emoticons. Different shades of gray squares are best for this task.

To get the pointy edge of the visor I'm using triangles. It is also one of most bright elements on the model image, so the triangles are white.

Adding glowing cross on the left, and little holes on the right.

Also, some skull corrections can be noticed.

Another screenshot of many corrections that were made. Eyes got more glow, helmet is more round, part of the armor under the golden ring is not a black hole anymore.

Final emoticon choice for the tiny holes on the right side has been made but before that, many different emoticons had to be tried.

Pre-final form that was sent to the client, with some corrections of the skull, armor, visor front, and of course adding the teal background. It was enough to use only two, low character count emoticons, to get a sort of shading. The direction of shading is oposite to that from the model picture, but that was just looking better on the mosaic.

This is not an issue if you are making a mosaic for yourself, from your own emoticons, but when it is for someone else, getting to the point of the final product is not an easy task. Some emoticons used could not be available on the market anymore, or could have astronomical prices. Making the product available for the client involves lots of consultations, checking prices of each emote (the set for this mosaic was around 40 emots), replacing problematic ones, reducing the number of emots used, changing expensive ones to cheaper equivalents, etc.

The final emoticon art of the Grey Knight, may look much more simple and "cartoonish" then the original picture, but is much more clear and readable, than what Mosaticon generated.

Emoticon art presented in this guide is just an example. Most of the times working on each mosaic has its individual struggles. My two goals of this guide was to show the process of making those mosaics (to those who are curious or think it is easy "becasue Mosaticon"), and by that helping those who want to make their own, but are dissapointed with the Mosaticon generation results. I'm glad if you would find this guide helpful, but if not, and you have any ideas how to improve it or spotted any errors, please let me know.


Have fun with emoticons.



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