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My dice portrait of Albert Einstein is finally finished and hanging on my wall.

A little over a year ago, I read a blog post about creating an amazing portrait of The Madonna using dice. I loved the idea, and after some minor hesitation, decided to blatantly steal the concept. Einstein would be my subject, almost purely so that I could use this title, though it is a bit of a mis-quote. I immediately started writing code to visualize different dice images, and playing with different algorithms for picking the dice. In an effort to differentiate my project I tried using a mixture of black and white dice to give 12 colour choices.

Ultimately I decided that the resulting image looked too blocky and pixelated. I was able to generate some interesting images by adding grey dice and working with 18 shades. But that seemed to sacrifice some of the purity, fun and craziness of making an image in dice. As one of my friends said, I might as well be working in a medium that is appropriate for a portrait if I am going to throw grey dice into the mix.

An idea from the reddit discussion of The Dice Madonna was rotating the 2s, 3s and 6s to create more detail. I experimented with generating images that rotated these dice and used an error calculation to look for an improvement. I was never able to generate a result that I was happy with using this technique. I find the white space created by rotating adjacent 2s and 3s creates weird interference patterns without contributing to the image. Here is an image showing the problem.

I ultimately decided on a 4950 dice image generated with a population algorithm for dice distribution. My final image uses some rotation of 2s 3s and 6s in very limited situations. I also experimented with dithering, but decided against it.

Once I had an image, I ordered 5000 dice from Koplow Games. I chose the 12mm dice, as they are smaller, lighter and cheaper than the more common 16mm dice. However they are still large enough to qualify as what most people consider normal dice.

The next step was to build a flash program to help me place the dice. Follow the link to try it out. Click to give the program focus, and use the arrow keys to move around the image.

Actually placing the dice took about 12 hours, spread out over a week. A friend built a case from plywood and lexan, which was a huge help. Carpentry is not one of my strengths. Interestingly the assembled dice were not very square. There is enough variation in the dice that I needed to use foam tape around the inside of the frame to even the edges out. The final package weighs 53lbs, and I was concerned about hanging it from the wall. But a trip to a local framing store provided all of the needed hardware.

I took me over a year of off and on work to go from idea to art on my wall, but it was very fun. Incredibly, about a month ago I saw this link to a 10 year old web page that demonstrates just how rare new ideas are.