Some things I've learned for working on this cheese slope mosaic so far:

• Cheese slopes are expensive for their size. Especially ones in rare colors that I just HAVE to have in bulk.
  
• LEGO Pick-a-Brick walls have never had any opaque colored cheese slopes besides the olive green ones.
  
• When a BrickLink store says there's probably going to be a delay, that should be a red flag. Took over three weeks to get the order (even if it was kinda large) but can't really complain cause he posted a warning.
  
• Putting on thousands of cheese slopes onto a baseplate can give you a hand cramp something fierce. Not an issue I've had with brick mosaics, but the cheese slopes are smaller and require a bit more dexterity to get on correctly... I dunno, but it got painful after a while.
  
• I underestimated my need for 1x1 light grays. I had this brilliant idea that I could save time, money, and overall piece count by purchasing a bunch of 1x2 cheese slopes in light gray, but I didn't pay close enough attention to my design. While there have been plenty of areas where these 1x2s help, there's still too many 1x1s I need to use, and I've run through my collection, so I need to order even more. *sigh*
  
• (And because of the restrictions in the build, 1x2 sections can only go vertically, not horizontally.)
  
• I might have also underestimated how many black 1x1s I need? I originally made the design two years ago using a mosaic program, but I have since to reinstall it on my new computer, so I've counted all the colors I need manually... which gives potential for error.
  
• Having five shades of blue is nice...
  
• But gold doesn't really stand in for dark tan. Olive green does, so I was planning to do a gradient from olive green to gold in the dark tan areas, but the gold might be too bright. Don't know if I want to fill it in with more olive green or actually try to find dark tan in bulk?
  
• 48x96 is a decent size. It's still quite small compared to some of the iconic slope mosaics (Batman/Joker, Anakin/Darth Vader) but I think it's big enough to get some attention at shows. The last one I did was a meager 32x32 and it got completely overlooked.)
  

Don't quite know when I'll have time to finish it, because I'm definitely going to have to make another order, at least for the light gray, maybe for some purple, black, and dark tan elements too. The build today only took me... 6 ish hours, maybe 7 if you count doing an inventory of the orders I received. Won't have time this weekend, maybe next.