'We made Pep Guardiola's portrait out of dice'

A pair of artists who worked out how to create portraits using dice said they were delighted after Manchester City invited them to build a likeness of manager Pep Guardiola.

Ross Montgomery and Ben Hoblyn, of Dice Ideas in Derby, were asked to create the piece to commemorate Guardiola's 500th game in charge of the club.

The pair, both 33, who met at school, found the inspiration to start creating portraits from dice after watching people make artwork out of Rubik's Cubes during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Mr Hoblyn told the BBC: "For us, it was something that we were super excited to do. Pep is so well known and such a well-established manager, so that's what makes it great."

The Derby-based artists created this portrait of Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola for his 500th game in charge of the club

Mr Hoblyn and Mr Montgomery had already created dice portraits of Harry Kane, Wayne Rooney, Adele, Nicki Minaj and even Yoda from Star Wars when they were commissioned by Manchester City.

But the pair did not have the chance to see any live action of the Manchester derby on 15 December as they were working on the portrait, which took between six and seven hours to complete.

Mr Hoblyn said: "We have no idea if Pep has seen it.

"We saw his Instagram account posted the video Manchester City put out, but we were unsure if that was him or just his social media team doing it for him."

The pair met at school in Duffield and took inspiration for their business after watching people make art from Rubik's Cubes

How the process works

Mr Hoblyn said the designs were made by a mix of computers and the pair themselves.

They first put a photo of Guardiola into a computer, which condensed it down into pixels, which were then assigned one of six shades by the program to represent one of the faces of a dice.

The pair then used the road map created by the computer to place each individual dice in the correct position to create the portrait.

The piece will go back to Manchester City after Mr Hoblyn and Mr Montgomery fix all the dice in place and place it inside a frame.

The pair turn an image into pixels on a computer and then replace each pixel into a numbered dice face representing different shades

They have also had work commissioned by Disney, Paramount Studios and Madison Square Garden in New York.

"We did a lot of videos showing what we do on TikTok and Instagram, which happened to fly off and that then brought in orders for us," Mr Hoblyn added.

"Everything has been great so far - our original plan was to have a bit of fun and possibly sell some bits along the way.

"Now we have been seen worldwide, we have sold more and more pieces, had collaborations with more businesses, so it has grown more than we thought."

The pair create all kinds of designs out of dice