To promote mosaic as a fine art, we encourage people to make their own mosaic designs and to choose non-gridded over gridded designs.
Nevertheless, there are many situations that call for naturalistic images, and these are most easily made using a gridded design where each tile is treated as a tiny pixel.
A good example of the type of mosaics I am describing are the portraits in the large mosaic murals made by The Mosaic Workshop in Austin, Texas.
For these type mosaics, design tools are used to generate a pixel map.
Grid Designer
Recently we have been playing around with an online design tool called Grid Designer that was created for knitting and crotchet designs and using it to create simple mosaic patterns.
This online design tool was created by Agnes Freese, a retired software developer who has worked in crotchet and knitting for years.
Judging from her website, I suspect that Agnes is like so many artists I have known over the years: technically skilled, creative in different areas, and always working on something.
Original Designs
We have been using Agnes’s Grid Designer software to create some free mosaic patterns, but I am more interested in seeing what original patterns our customers create with it.
Grid Designer is easy to use: You quickly draw with your mouse, and revisions are a snap. This allows you to compare different variations and select the strongest composition.
Grid Designer allows the user to create patterns that are as large as 500 x 500 tiles. The software could be used for much larger projects merely by dividing the design into sections.
Please email photos of us what you make with this!
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