A Rubik's Cube has six colors, and each face has nine little squares. If you put lots of cubes together and turn each one until its front face shows exactly the right colors, every little square works like a pixel on a screen. That's how Rubik's Cube mosaics are made: huge images that are a pile of cubes up close and a painting from a distance.
The Macau mosaic
This video shows how one of the most famous mosaics was built: the skyline of Macau, made for the One Central shopping center and unveiled in December 2012. It was made by Cube Works, the Canadian studio of Josh Chalom, who has been making art with Rubik's Cubes for years.
According to Guinness World Records, the mosaic covered 277 square meters and had 85,626 cubes (some news reports at the time talked about some 85,800). For years it was the largest cube mosaic in the world.
The current record: 109,000 cubes
Today the record belongs to the Chenghai Toys Association, in Shantou (China), an area with a huge number of toy factories. On 24 October 2024 it unveiled a mosaic of 109,000 cubes that covers almost 338 square meters, more than a tennis court. This video, published by the cube brand MoYu, shows it from end to end:
Guinness also has another category for double-sided mosaics, which show one image on the front and a different one on the back. Since each cube has opposite faces, the colors have to be chosen carefully so that both images come out at the same time.
How a cube mosaic is made
- The image is chosen and reduced to a grid of pixels: three pixels wide for every cube. A mosaic of 100 × 100 cubes is a 300 × 300 pixel image.
- It's converted to six colors: white, yellow, red, orange, blue and green. There are programs that do it automatically and look for the best combination so that shadows and gradients look good from a distance.
- Each cube is prepared: it has to be turned until its front face has exactly the nine colors of its piece of the image. You don't need to know how to solve the cube, but it helps to know how the pieces move.
- The cubes are placed on a frame, row by row, following a plan.
Step 3 is the one that takes time: in a mosaic of 100,000 cubes you have to prepare 100,000 faces, one by one. That's why these records are made by big teams working for days or weeks.
Build your own mosaic
You don't need thousands of cubes. With 9 cubes (3 × 3) you can already make a 9 × 9 pixel image: a heart, a video game mushroom or the initial of your name. With 36 cubes (6 × 6) you can make a simple face. A few tips:
- Use identical cubes, the same model with the same shades, so the colors don't change from one cube to another.
- Draw the image on graph paper first and mark which square goes with each cube.
- Choose high-contrast images: with only six colors, fine details get lost.
And if you like the pictures you can make on a single cube, take a look at our Rubik's Cube patterns, like the checkerboard or the cube in a cube. If you can't solve it yet, here's the step-by-step Rubik's Cube solution.