• Mosaic Garden Sign

    Mosaic Garden Sign

    The Mosaic QR Code that I made for my garden needs some text with it because most people assume the sign is for some realtor or other commercial service. I decided to make a mosaic sign with the text “About This Garden” that could be displayed with the QR Code Mosaic.

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  • Contrasts: Value Versus Hue

    Contrasts: Value Versus Hue

    Natalija Moss’s latest mosaic is a small work of 12 inches in width, but it demonstrates the power of contrast in value and of contrast in hue.

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  • Mosaic Obelisk Garden Sculpture

    Mosaic Obelisk Garden Sculpture

    Lyn Richards has been making a series of mosaic obelisks for installation as garden sculptures, each with a completely different design. Like her Irises mosaic birdbath, Lyn’s garden obelisks are tightly executed.

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  • Vinegar Cleaning Grout Haze and Pit Stains

    Vinegar Cleaning Grout Haze and Pit Stains

    Glass mosaic tile, particularly vitreous glass tiles have sometimes have a few tiny pits in their surface, and these tiny pits can get stained with grout. Fortunately the pit staining can be prevented by applying a product called grout release before grouting, which is what installers use for large architectural tiling jobs. You can also…

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  • Sizing Your Mosaic

    Sizing Your Mosaic

    Once you have a design you would like to create in mosaic, the next step is to determine how large to make it. The minimum size a mosaic can be is determined by the finest detail to be depicted in the image. I recommend trying to render that one finest detail first to determine if…

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  • Van Gogh’s Cat Mixed-Media Mosaic Sculpture

    Van Gogh’s Cat Mixed-Media Mosaic Sculpture

    Artist Peter Vogelaar has been at it again, and this time he has managed to surprise me. His recent mixed-media mosaic sculpture Van Gogh’s Cat has a plinth that steals the show in my opinion. The plinth on which the cat is standing is a mosaic-covered cylinder that seamlessly combines Van Gogh’s Starry Night and…

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  • Fundamentals of Mosaic Composition

    Fundamentals of Mosaic Composition

    I recently completed a mosaic titled Woodpecker Forest, which shows a pileated woodpecker on the side of a pine tree in a forest carpeted with capensis flowers. I think this composition is a good teaching example because it demonstrates several fundamentals of visual art. There is strong value contrast (light-dark) contrast in both the figure…

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  • Pileated Woodpecker Mosaic

    Pileated Woodpecker Mosaic

    My Pileated Woodpecker mosaic was made by improvising over a pattern. I created the pattern from a photo collage that I made in Photoshop.

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  • Stained Glass Improvised Mosaic

    Stained Glass Improvised Mosaic

    I made a mosaic of a pileated woodpecker by improvising over a pattern. Below is a video of the process of laying up the mosaic on a temporary surface of sticky contact paper.

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  • Classic Tattoo Design Mosaics

    Classic Tattoo Design Mosaics

    Artist Sheldon Stehman‘s tattoo-inspired work demonstrates the vitality of the mosaic medium and how surprisingly well it accommodates contemporary pop-culture designs and themes. Sheldon uses classic tattoo designs as models for his mosaic interpretations. I think that was an inspired decision.

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  • Variations on a Theme: Insight Mosaics

    Variations on a Theme: Insight Mosaics

    Artist Natalija Moss rebuilds Honda Insight hybrid cars, and she also makes mosaics of them using stained glass. Here are a few Honda Insight mosaics she made years ago. Unfortunately, Natalija didn’t take definitive photographs of each them, and so the images in this article were all created from the group photo using Photoshop. Even…

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  • Kingfisher Mosaic: Improvising over a Pattern

    Kingfisher Mosaic: Improvising over a Pattern

    I made a video that shows how to translate an image into mosaic by improvising loosely over a pattern. The pattern I used for this demonstration was the pattern I created quickly using Photoshop for a friend.

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