My partner and I were at the Oculus Go VR conference a few years back in San Francisco, and they had one of those mosaic social media boards where you take your picture and then print it out and after the conference goes for a few days it becomes this really cool mosaic of all of the participants that makes this really cool picture. As soon as I saw it, I knew that I wanted to do something similar in my classroom but with book covers because I teach English…. duh. So when we got back, I set to work on making it happen.
I used a program called PictureMosaics.com to construct the final image. Yes, I did have to pay for the program – it was about $60. There were several steps, including designing the overall picture that I wanted. If you would like to make your own, you can follow the directions on the program, but I’ll list out what I did below with some tips that will maybe help your overall mosaic look better…. Or you can hop on over to the HSJ shop or my Teacherpayteachers store and download the files the way I made it.
My absolute favorite book of all time is The Hobbit. I wanted an overall image that spoke to the themes of that book and I eventually found that most of the images I tried were too detailed to make the final bulletin look decent. I ended up finding a background image of some mountains that started with a light color at the top and then gradually got darker toward the bottom of the image. I took this image in photoshop and used the text feature to type out the words you see – …your next great adventure awaits…
It was important that this was a HUGE file and I used photoshop to increase the resolution and make sure that it was the same measurement of my actual bulletin board. Because I wasn’t going to pay to have this thing professionally printed all in one piece (teacher budget lol), I had the grand idea that I would just make one big giant image with the PictureMosiacs program and then use Photoshop to chop it all up into 8.5×11 printable images and then piece it all together.
After I had the first background image finalized, I set to work finding and saving hundreds of .jpg book covers, author quotes, and book/reading memes. This is what probably took the longest. I used best selling lists and classics lists, goodreads, image searches, etc. After I had what I felt was enough files I used the steps on the PictureMosaics program to adjust and finesse the mosaic. I noticed that many of the book covers were used repeatedly, so I then went back to work of finding more pictures to use and kept adding until I felt that it didn’t bother me that repeated.
The overall final HUGE file is included in the download. So are 90 (yes ninety) individual .jpg files that are numbered in the order that they need to be mounted and aligned on the bulletin board. Starting from top left and using 18 files per row. I had to trim the white edges off of each page after they printed which was also hugely time consuming. However, I think everything turned out really well in the end. And yea, I had to use my own color printer at home and print all the images. I went through a ton of ink, but I knew what I wanted and how long I wanted it to last, so I was expecting that cost. You can see below how they line up where I trimmed and stapled them up and how I had a mix of book covers, quotes, memes, etc…
These pictures are from before we left my room in March of 2020. Since then, my walls have been painted, but because I really never had students in my room, I never really finished this with a border. It’s one of the things I’m super excited about finishing when I can get back into my room and set things up.
I love how it turned out overall, and it is always a source of conversations with students about books they find that they have read. I even love when they will look at it and come across something and say “Oh cool! I’ve seen that movie, I didn’t know it was a book!” I’ve also tried my hardest since making this to have these books in my classroom library so that when that happens, I can say yeahhhh… would you like to try it? And then hand it to them and watch their face light up that I’m ok with them reading a book that has been made into a movie. So fun!