Ever since I saw Nick Misani's first fauxsaic, it immediately made my "I-need-to-try-this" list. But as you can imagine, drawing each mosaic piece by hand is not something you look forward and I waited till now to push through the pain and just have a go. 17+ hours later, my first fauxsaic was finished.
Here's how I did it:
Starting with a general draft/concept on the left, a working sketch in the middle and a light proof of concept about 3 hours into the project. (designed in Procreate)
8 hours and 7834 strokes later I ended up with the final mosaic grid. But without the new drawing assist feature from procreate it would have surely taken over 10 hours.
Thus began the tedious task of coloring in every single piece one by one with the bucket tool in Photoshop. At this stage it was really important to create color palettes within the colors to imitate a real mosaic.
Finally, to make this believable, three elements were essential:
1. Adding texture (I used a custom made texture layer provided by Nick Misani)
2. Humans (adding photos of humans to a scene makes everything more realistic)
3. Light&Shadows (I used gradients as well as the brush to paint in shadows)
