This is going to sound silly, but it wouldn’t be the first time. I needed to create a digital mosaic from a piece of Illustrator art. Not one of those high tech picture mosaic, where a person’s portrait is rendered with a thousand little pictures. I am talking about the old school little chips of tile, cut and clipped and assembled piece by piece to create an image or design. Of course I have neither the time nor inclination to do one by hand and the nature of the job I am working dictated a digital solution.

PhotoShop has a mosaic filter which is more of a name than a tool. It will apply a mosaic-like texture over a photograph and I am sure (like most of the filters) it is a great place to start to develop random fields of texture from which to build or apply masks. But as a stand alone solution it sucks. Not very mosaic like. Alien Skin Software makes a plug-in for PhotoShop that has a mosaic effect, but it falls short as well. While definitely more mosaic like, it nver the less looks “canned” and delivers a buggy, gap filled, inconsistent mosaic patten.

AutoFX also has a plug-in and a stand alone product which really doesn’t do much more than PhotoShop’s basic mosaic filter (plus or minus a few bells and whistles.)

After studying a few mosaics I stumbled across a solution that is perfect. I am not sure why I didn’t go here before but I never really thought of it. It is a tool I use a lot — but over the course of years have never uncovered this gem hidden in a menu that I obviously glaze over in search of other things.

Corel Painter has a Mosaic tool, that is not strictly a filter but uses your pen to fill in or “paint” tiles. This can be done freehand, (like the real deal only faster and digital), or you can use a cloned color source and paint over top. What really makes this outstanding is the natural way you control the pattern of tiles. Because it works like a pen, you can control the direction, the overlap, the natural gapping, the color, everything! You can override a portion or a single tile. You control the grout color and width and it works as fast as you can draw a line.

After drawing my test mosaic, I dumpped it into photshop, attached a layer effect to give the tiles some dimention, and exported it out to my program 3D texture program. Very cool.