Diamojism™ - What is it?

Diamojism is a new art form inspired by the portrait mosaics of Chuck Close, reimagined for the digital age. Using a custom-built program, I transform familiar images into expressive visual narratives—constructed entirely from emojis. This is not AI art.

In Diamojism, emojis become my brushstrokes. Each piece is composed of adaptive, diamond-shaped tiles that vary in size, creating structure, depth, and detail.

The result is both an image and commentary—a reflection on modern communication that reveals the emotion, nuance, and subtext embedded in the symbols we use every day.

Diamojism brings together my background in technology with contemporary expression and mosaic tradition to create a distinctive form of visual storytelling.

The system accepts an input image and the desired printing dimensions. The image is divided into tiles and selectively subdivided into smaller tiles where necessary. The subdivision is done adaptively based on image detail level or artist specified areas such as a face. An emoji is selected for each tile based on a perceptual matching score until the entire input image has been reinterpreted.

The Emoji Lisa has 5814 tiles and uses 734 unique emoji in various sizes and rotations.

Emoji artwork derived from Noto Emoji (© Google LLC, OFL 1.1). Emoji images were rotated and conditionally color-adjusted in processing.