Mosaics by U.S. college grad draws attention of sports stars

A U.S. college grad known as the ‘College Cuber’ is producing amazing mosaics using Rubik's cubes that are drawing attention from professional athletes on social media.

Dylan Sadiq said he needed something to do when he was taking classes online while studying biomedical engineering at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He bought several Rubik’s Cubes and the rest is history.

“As an engineer, our job in school is to imagine super outlandish ideas and recreate those ideas in real life,” said Sadiq.

“During COVID I became frustrated when I was unable to use my hands for projects anymore, so I started some at-home projects and some of the things I learned in school in terms of designs and I created designs.”

Sadiq said it takes him about three hours and 560 Rubik’s cubes to complete one of his creations. The recent university graduate also created time-lapse videos of each of his works of art. He then posts them to social media.

Sadiq has recreated several professional athletes -- Tom Brady of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Francisco Lindor of the New York Mets and Lebron James of the Los Angeles Lakers, to name a few.

His work became so well known on social media that the Canadian Football League wanted Sadiq to put together a mosaic on Henoc Muamba of the Toronto Argonauts.

Muamba was the most valuable player and most valuable Canadian during last year’s Grey Cup.

Sadiq said he has spent tens of thousands of dollars on Rubik’s Cubes and has more than 40 000 of them.

“This is now my full-time job, my full-time business,” he said.

“I am super grateful to be able to buy all my supplies to make my artwork happen.”

Sadiq has presented some of his artwork to the athletes themselves and he says they ask him “how do you even pull this off?”

A huge basketball fan, Sadiq said he would like to go down the long list of basketball greats and complete mosaics of them.