My 2nd PostIt creation

This probably should have been my first post…

• Do you grow bored with your apartment furnishings and decorations – perhaps changing them frequently?
• Do you consider your self “artistically inclined”?
• Are you a do it yourself-er?
• Did you grow up playing Atari and Nintendo?

If you answered yes to the questions above, then you will hopefully understand what I’m trying to accomplish with this project.  If you answered “no”, you will probably think this is a great big waste of of time and money (you may be right)

What is the Mosaic Project?

I would have answered “yes” to the above questions. When I’m home, I tend to move furniture around, repaint and rearrange things more than is probably necessary.  Unfortunately for me, moving furniture and changing my artwork is a time consuming and/or  expensive process.  I was wondering if I could somehow build some sort of modular wall art which I could easily change the look of  room without spending a lot of time and money.

I had come across some pictures of “8 bit art” on the web where people had made some amazing wall murals using nothing but 3″ Post It notes.  I wanted to take this idea and expand it to something with a little more substance than Post Its and furthermore make it easier to change the design.

After much deliberation and sketches, I concluded that my first crack at this was going to involve magnets.  Magnets are flat, relatively cheap and fun!  Some magnetic material can be cut into whatever size you like – which is also important.

Now the harder question… What should the mosaic tiles be made out of?  Plastic?  Wood? The magnets themselves? For starters I decided to go with wood.  I found a pretty cheap supplier of the type of wood I think I need.  Plastic is surprisingly expensive unless you are buying a ton of it.  Wood also seems to be a little classier.  I think I can stain it if I want classier mosaics that don’t involve Nintendo characters.

The base is also tricky.  I probably spent the most time thinking about this.  Obviously the magnets would stick well to sheets of steel.  Unfortunately steel is heavy and has potentially sharp edges.  You can buy perforated steel which looks cool and would be lighter but this gets expensive.  Though my magnet research, I learned about a new flexible material that is “Magnetic Receptive” called FlexIron.  My current plan is to either attach the magnetic tiles to one giant piece of this material, or alternatively, cut Flexiron into smaller squares and attach them to a lightweight base like FoamCore.

Phew… That was the most I think I’ve ever written in the span of 30 minutes.  I’m an engineer by trade and not really into writing documents like this but it couldn’t be avoided 😉  I have ordered samples of all the materials I mentioned, and I’m anxious to get started on “Modular Mosaic 1.0“