Very cool idea! Could have countless applications for personal and business uses ie logos or unique wall designs for restaurants etc.

This could also be done with parquet floor, linolium, etc. Each tile would have a number on the back tellin gyou where to lay it down. One concern is that floor measurment would have to be really precise.

The operative word in this idea is "template". With the printers now in use by the outdoor sign industry, templates for large scale "numbers painting" could be provided for both home and commercial applications.

Precise room measurements need not be an issue. In fact manufactures/installers of such things as blinds, countertops, etc. want to make their own measurements to protect themselves from consumer error. The solution is a border that would be cut to fit, or consist of tiles small enough to be omitted entirely. Most rooms aren't really square anyway, and the border could take up the difference. Also, better than a template and individually numbered tiles is to have them shop adhered to a backing. This is how patterns in bathroom tile already come. Pieces approximately two feet square are standard because they are easily manageable. Laying a whole room tile by tile would be either a tru labor of love or torture, and prohibitively expensive to do commercially.

The concept is great, though!

Here's what you need: www.hektor.ch (Click on the PDF)Number your tiles, place them in a verticle grid, and let Hektor go nuts.

www.hektor.ch is under construction. You can actually buy these tiles at http://www.tilemurals.net/, even the custom ones.

its not tiles, and may give results that in the end arent exactly too... aesthetically sophisticated, but...there's this.

Here have been my thoughts on the issue and using graphics programs to create beauty through tile:

First, you need to establish a "palette" of tiles that will match up with the colors of a graphics program's palette. Research what colors of tiles are easily available for purchase and get their exact RGB colors. Once you have a list of at least 16 (though my eventual goal would be 256), you'd be ready to start.

Take an image and decide what scale you want to use. 1" tiles are pretty standard and would be good for indoor or household use. If you wanted to decorate a church or mosque, 3" or even 6" tiles would be more reasonable. So let's say you have a 2'x3' tabletop you want to decorate. In 1" tiles, that's 24"x36", or 864 tiles.

Yes, this is gonna take some time. :)

Resize the image you want to use so that it is 24x36. This may not allow you the contrast you want... so you could go bigger. But remember, in 1" tiles, we're talking a resolution in the mosaic of 12pix/foot. Or 1DPI. Pretty big artwork. Of course, you could use smaller tesserae, like pony beads or even normal beadwork, but that's gonna get progressively more fat-finger-syndrome-able.

Load the palette into the graphic program. Now, take any image of suffient contrast and choose to lower its color palette to 256 colors-- using the palette you have created from the colors of tiles. You now have a 256 color image where you know the exact palette number of each pixel.

As it stands, that's gonna take a lot of effort to research the palette number on each spot and then match it up with each color of tile. Perhaps prohibitive amounts of time. But if you were to go through and, using a standard palette, assign each colored tile the number of its palette order corresponding to that tile... now we're closer to being in business.

All we need now is a program that would take an image and give us a printed-out matrix of the palette order of each pixel. We'd get an output like this:

001 001 001 001 001001 005 230 211 001001 255 212 222 001001 001 001 001 001

And our mosaic becomes a paint-by-number. A LARGE paint-by-number requiring a lot of time and patience. But it's no longer prohibitive. It's doable.

Hope this inspires somebody.

--------UPDATE:Here's a Webliography that might help you if you want to make this dream a reality.

http://www.mosaictilemarket.com/ - a place to actually buy the tiles in hundreds of colors.

http://www.mosaictilesupplies.com/ - more supplies

http://www.yikes.com/~pengo/images/Pixel_art/ - An experiment in a much less permanent art form, and something that might be good practice-- Post-It notes on glass.