Civic art project: 5'H x 5'W 3D heart shape sculpture. Can Blender map a 12" grid on it? From photos? Please forgive my intrusion into your amazing Blender world, I downloaded Blender in the hope it might help but, as a artist in the physical world it's all Greek to me so I am hoping someone here can help me out with this project.

The photos show the problem, I hope. Our city has installed a number of these 5' high by 5' wide fiberglass 3D hearts around the city and asked local artists and art related businesses to decorate them. My colleagues and I will be covering one in mosaic. We are at the planning stage...

The mosaic will be applied to 12" squares of thin mesh first and then those squares of mesh will all be attached to the heart later, all on the same day. 

My hope was/is that Blender can work with photos of the heart sculpture, dividing the heart into 12" squares so we can plan the design to fit the heart as accurately as possible in advance. I've attached one compilation photo showing the sculpture from several angles but I had to downsize it drastically to be able to attach it here and I have no idea if it's enough to work with. 

My question ... Can Blender wrap the heart with a 12" square grid and then allow us to flatten the grid out, so we can add a mosaic design over that and make sure it will fit around the surface of the heart? 

Or, if we came up with a basic design, can Blender then wrap that design around the heart, and let us add a 12" grid pattern over that, then flatten that out so we can see how to lay out design on the pieces of mesh.

Either way we can definitely tweak the edges of the various mosaiced sections around the edges to make it fit when the time comes, but if we can use Blender to reduce the amount of 'in situ' work required to a minimum we would love to do that.
Yes. 

You will first have to model the heart which shouldn't be a problem considering you can get all the dimensions you need.
It may take a lot of tweaking to get precise measurements but you can get very close with little difficulty.

Blender has an option to change units. This includes Inches :D

Once you have created the model, look into UV unwrapping in Blender. There is plenty of tutorials on it. You can paint the object in Blender without exporting but I recommend exporting it and using a program like Gimp or Photoshop for better results. You could also print the UV and draw over it, then scan it back into the program.

You should be able to find tutorial videos on all the things you wish to do.

Some other helpful tools you may want to look into would include:


Grease pencil
Mirror Modifier


Helpfull Links:


Units in Blender
Blender for Beginners
UV Unwrapping


Though it won't make much of a difference when modelling, if you want to render a design picture, I recommend using cycles engine.

Good luck with your project and I hope I helped,

BFB