In this paper, a block based image approximation technique using the Self Affine System(SAS) from the fractal theory is suggested. Each block of an image is divided into 4 tiles and 4 affine mapping coefficients are found for each tile. To find the affine mapping cefficients that minimize the error between the affine transformed image block and the reconstructed image block, the matrix euation is solved by setting each partial differential coefficients to aero. And to ensure the convergence of coding block. 4 uniformly partitioned affine transformation is applied. Variable block size technique is employed in order to applynatural image reconstruction property of fractal image coding. Large blocks are used for encoding smooth backgrounds to yield high compression efficiency and texture and edge blocks are divided into smaller blocks to preserve the block detail. Affine mapping coefficinets are found for each block having 16$ imes$16, 8$ imes$8 or 4$ imes$4 size. Each block is classified as shade, texture or edge. Average gray level is transmitted for shade bolcks, and coefficients are found for texture and edge blocks. Coefficients are quantized and only 16 bytes per block are transmitted. Using the proposed algorithm, the computational load increases linearly in proportion to image size. PSNR of 31.58dB is obtained as the result using 512$ imes$512, 8 bits per pixel Lena image