Rubikubism - Rubik's Cube Pixel Art Mosaics
What can you do if you’ve got a hundreds of Rubik's Cubes in your collection, and some serious artistic talent? Rubik's Cube pixel art or Rubikubism is what you can use them for.
- 1 World records
- 2 How to build
- 3 Gallery
Convert your images to Rubik's Cube pixel art
Many mosaics have been made with the Rubik’s Cube over its lifespan. Most of these depict famous images such as the Sistine Chapel paintings, depictions of The Last Supper and more, and other mosaics depict famous people who have affected thousands of lives. Other mosaics are simply created to look good, without any symbolic meaning or person to represent.
The largest mosaic in the world was created by Cube Works Studio, and used 85,794 cubes to recreate the skyline of Macau, China. The mosaic was 13-foot-high and 200+ wide, demolishing the previous world record that used a mere (in comparison), 12,000 cubes.
The Creation of Adam – Josh Chalom
The previous World Record before the Macau skyline was the recreation of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” masterpiece from the Sistine Chapel. This was created in 2010 by Josh Chalom, and used 12,090 cubes. The piece took 400 hours to create from start to finish.
The Last Supper – Josh Chalom
Previous works from the same artist include the depiction of the famous “The Last Supper” painting. This was created using 4,050 cubes, and is 17x8.5 foot in size. Created in 2009, the mosaic sold for $50,000 to a private Florida collector.
You can also buy a mosaic if you don't want to spend time building it. Street artist known as Invader is made world famous pictures out of cubes, like Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. He used up to 800 classic Magic Cubes for each work and sells them for £20,000.
In 2010 the largest Rubik's Cube mosaic was 8.78m x 4.44m, containing 12,090 individual 3x3x3 Rubik's Cubes and resembled Michelangelo’s "The Creation of Adam" image from the Sistine Chapel. The artwork was created by Cube Works Studio and it was exhibited at the Cube Works Gallery in Toronto, Canada, from 28 September to 3 October 2010.
How to build Rubik's Cube mosaics
Count the Rubik's Cubes you can use to determine the resolution of the picture. If you have one thousand cubes then you can build a pretty nice 90x100 pixel Rubik's mosaic. Then you have to map out the precise pixel positions for each cube in these "paintings". You can do this with a simple image editor on your PC by decreasing the color depth on a selected picture to use only 6 colors.
The good news is you don't have to solve the whole cube, just the one that's visible when the cubes are all put next to each other.
There's a free online program to generate the pixels for your masterpiece from an uploaded image:
Online Mosaic Generator.
Mosaic Gallery
If you're interested in the 'Rubikubism' you can find a few example mosaics in the gallery below for inspiration.

Mr Bean

Joker by Jack Nicholson

Colonel Sanders, KFC logo

Statue of Liberty

Lips

Madonna

Super Mario

Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci)

Marilyn Monroe

New York

Barack Obama

Pretending - abstract painting by Fidostudio

Rubik's Cube

Ruwix logo

Scared pop art comic book lady

The Smurfs

Leonidas - 300 (2006)

Mr. Spock - Star Trek

Super Man

Titanic (1997)

Yellow cab

Grumpy cat

Che Guevara

David Beckham

Earth

Albert Einstein

Elvis Presley

Red Ferrari

The Godfather

"Bliss" Windows XP wallpaper

Michael Jackson

Johnny Depp

Trollface
