Michael Jacobs Fine Art

06/16/2026

Botticelli's Birth of Venus as an emoji mosaic

Birth of Emoji is built from 24,088 tiles drawing on 986 unique emoji. It required 31 artist regions — more than any Diamoji to date — and introduced full color calibration to the process for the first time. Botticelli's sfumato technique made none of this straightforward.

06/10/2026

Number 4 in my Diamoji Portfolio:

Van Gogh painted the night sky as pure energy — swirling, structured, alive. Recreating that in emoji turned out to be the hardest problem I've faced in Diamojism. Here's how it got solved.

06/05/2026

Seurat built A Sunday on La Grande Jatte from 3.5 million dots of pure color. This one took 14,691 emoji — 1,748 unique symbols, chosen tile by tile for color, edge, and form.

05/29/2026

The hardest Diamoji project yet. It took 53 iterations over 9 days resulting in 15,525 tiles and several new software features and tools.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa is one of the most recognized images ever made. Rendering it as a Diamoji meant solving problems no portrait had ever asked for — and building three new capabilities to do it. This is the story of how a wave became 15,525 emoji tiles, and what it took to get there.

05/19/2026

Step closer. At distance, you see a portrait. Up close, you see what it's made of — thousands of individual emoji tiles, densest right here, at the eyes.

That's not an accident. I configured the system to give the eyes its finest resolution above everywhere else in the image. Not because the algorithm decided eyes matter. Because I did. The eyes are where we look first — I encoded that instinct, and the pipeline executed it.

What the system placed here to render her gaze — in tones it was searching for, not meanings it understood — is something worth zooming into yourself.

Learn more at https://www.mjacobsfineart.com/diamojism

05/18/2026

This is Emoji Lisa — the Mona Lisa reconstructed entirely from emojis.
No AI image generator. No filter. No source image bleeding through. Every tone, every gradient, every subtle curve of the mouth is carried by symbols — the same pictographs you use every day to express what words sometimes can't.

The system selected each of the 6,873 tiles for color and structure, not meaning. That it placed ❤️ and 💋 near her smile without being told to is not a feature. It is what happens when you build a portrait from a language that was never meant to be neutral.

Emoji Lisa is available as a limited edition print at mjacobsfineart.com

05/18/2026

What if a portrait could be built entirely from emojis — not filtered, not AI-generated, but constructed tile by tile from a library of over 100,000 symbols, each chosen for color and structure?

That question led me to build something from scratch. I call it Diamojism™ — a new art form that reconstructs portraits using emojis as brushstrokes. Each piece is made of diamond-shaped tiles that shift in size depending on how much detail the image demands. The face gets the finest resolution. The eyes get the finest of all.

This is my own portrait as a Diamoji. The system placed every tile. I made every decision that told it how.

Learn more: https://www.mjacobsfineart.com/diamojism

04/06/2026

I have new fine art for sale online and coming to the Semva Art Gallery soon! https://www.mjacobsfineart.com/shop/p/emoji-lisa

Emoji Lisa reimagines an iconic masterpiece through Diamojism, transforming familiar emojis into a meticulously composed mosaic. Printed on luminous metal and framed in a sleek black floater, the work blends classical reference with contemporary innovation—inviting a closer look where meaning reveals itself in the details.

03/21/2026

I've been experimenting with a digital art form where emojis become dynamic, diamond-shaped tiles, each chosen and placed through a program I created to explore the hidden language of digital expression. I've coined this artform 'diamojism'. The video demonstrates it well.

What do you think?

Diamojism is a new artform inspired by the meticulous portrait mosaics of Chuck Close, reimagined for the digital age. I transform modern emojis into expressive, visual narratives using a program of my own design—far beyond the capabilities of typical phone apps or online tools.

What makes Diamojism unique is its adaptive, diamond-shaped tiles that vary in size, giving each piece a dynamic structure and depth. This approach reflects both Close’s grid-based techniques and the layered subtleties of modern digital communication.

Each artwork functions as both a visual image and a reflection on expression itself, highlighting the hidden meanings, emotional nuances, and subtexts carried by emojis. Diamojism celebrates the intersection of technology, contemporary symbolism, and traditional mosaic sensibilities, establishing a distinctive new medium for storytelling in 21st-century art.

09/12/2025

Now available at www.mjacobsfineart.com as a print and the original is coming soon to Semva Art Gallery.

Soft Rain, Silent Beauty. Captured in the Biltmore Mansion’s famed rose garden, this print of the original pastel painting reflects the quiet beauty of a single rose kissed by morning rain. Each drop of dew and soft curve of the petals invites you to pause, breathe, and feel the timeless elegance of nature’s design.