Why another mosaic? It’s a mystery (science theater).

The Brothers Brick contributor Chris Doyle is back with another large-scale LEGO mosaic. This time he leaves the superheroes behind to celebrate a recent highlight of live-performance pop culture.

I’m a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and have spent a lot of time recreating the robots and scenes from the show in LEGO. Last December I was lucky enough to be treated to VIP passes to the MST3k Time Bubble Live Show, and was really taken with the new host, Emily Marsh. So much so, that I wanted to immortalize her role with a big ol’ mosaic. Read on after the jump for more about the process, and just what that stuff along the bottom edge is…

Emily Marsh MST3k Mosaic - some context

First off, here’s a closer look at the full image. Like most of my other forays into portrait art, I started with a base image, this time from one of Emily’s public Instagram posts. Since this shot wasn’t “in character”, I hand to hand-adjust things to put her into the iconic Gizmonic jumpsuit.  I used the LEGO Art Remix site to create several prototype images, this time experimenting with a base image in greyscale. this let me get an idea of color depth that I could then match against my available plate and tile to try and avoid the dreaded “zombie face” that I’ve been fighting since my Wonder Woman collaborative build.

Emily Marsh - host of the MST3k Live show

As the focus of the image, I spent a lot of time trying to get Emily’s face right. I used plate to add a bit of color depth (and physical depth) to areas, as well as using quarter-circle tile to add some half-tone values in. Flesh tones are a real pain to replicate in the currently available colors, but it feels like we’re getting more options fairly regularly. But in the meantime – we improvise.

Emily Detail

Along the bottom edge are some souvenirs from the Live show. At the far left is the badge from my VIP lanyard, and next to it is the Time Bubble pocket watch. This was the first time I’ve incorporated a “non-LEGO item” display into one of these mosaics. The added depth is…not ideal. But it makes this display a lot more meaningful to me.

Live show Swag

Emily joins my other MST3k Mosaics, just off to the right of my Classic JLA tributes. Thanks to random placement, it kind of looks like Emily has eyes for Superman.
Mosaic wall

Do you have a favorite LEGO Mosaic artist, theme, or style? Sound off in the comments and let’s get a discussion started!

2 comments on “Why another mosaic? It’s a mystery (science theater).”

  2. David Lee

    @hntrains. I don’t think there’s any CREATIVE challenges with mosaics. Buying the small parts in the right colors used to be hard in the past but with Lego color pallet these days, it shouldn’t be that hard anymore. So all you need to do is pixelize a pic and buy the parts and plug it in. Definitely not creative. I’m not trying to be insulting but it really can’t be that hard process-wise.

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