Mosaic Coffee Table integrated with interior design.

Mosaic Tables and Interior Design

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Artist RJ Spurr recently completed two mosaic tables for his home, and I wanted to share them because the level of craft work is excellent, and the designs are integrated with the color schemes of rooms where they were installed.

The great thing about dry indoor mosaics is that you can use wood as a base, and that means you can put mosaics on wooden tables. Thrift shops, yard sales, and unfinished furniture stores are great sources for tables, but you can also breath new life into old tables you already have on hand. Continue reading →

Maddie's Garden Memorial Cross

Mosaic Memorial Cross for Maddie

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Georgia Art Teacher Connie Wells has been working with her students on a memorial cross project:

Highland Christian Academy in Valdosta, GA  wanted to remember one of our 8th grade students, Maddie Pitts that recently passed away from cancer in a personal, honorable way. As we constructed a small garden area with a pink bench and beautiful flowers, the students will be making rows of mosaic tiles to place on the centerpiece cross as a personal tribute to her memory. Maddie’s siblings, will also place a personal row of tiles to add to the memorial.

We are so grateful to my daughter Katie at Mosaic Art Supply in Atlanta for their gracious donations of beautiful tiles for the students to compose their personal contribution. We are grateful to Home Depot for the grout and building base for the cross.

The cross stands 6′ by 4′, with its backer material mechanically fastened to the wall. Each line of tile is created by students.
Continue reading →

Mosaic Redwoods by Tracy Kaplan Grouted.

Choosing Grout Color Using Tile Test Swatches

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Tracy Kaplan recently emailed us a picture of her FIRST mosaic, and it is nice solid work, impressive even, especially considering that her instructor gave her some problematic advice concerning the grout color.  Tracy’s teacher had recommended a chocolate or nutmeg colored grout, but Tracy wisely considered how a dark brown might cause adjacent tree trunks to no longer be distinct and separate.

Perhaps Tracy’s instructor had meant a lighter shade of those browns, but I still think that those could have caused problems with the adjacent tree trunks.

Most likely, the instructor only saw a portion of the mosaic without adjacent tree trunks. Tracy admits that she only finished about an eighth of the work during the course and spent many months afterward working to complete it.

If so, this is yet another example of how artistic advice isn’t one-size-fits-all and can be counterproductive or even disastrous if the advice isn’t specific to a particular artist or even a particular work of art in its entirety.

Fortunately, Tracy emailed us for advice. Continue reading →

Mosaic Chair by Janie Wright, back detail

Mosaic Furniture Pique Assiette Alternative

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Mosaic furniture can be made from glass mosaic tile more easily and more affordably than it can be made from pieces cut from antique china and other patterned dinnerware. It’s also much more colorful! The choices available range from bright rainbow colors to soft pastels to different color families, earth tones, black and white.

You can even render portraits and landscapes on things like headboards because you have a complete rendering tool.

When you use glass tile instead of whatever you could scrounge up from months of yard sales and thrift shops, you start with a lot of horsepower on your side. Continue reading →

Garden Retaining Wall

Mosaic Mural Surface Preparation

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The best way to mount an outdoor mosaic mural is to use thinset mortar and mount it directly to a brick, stone, or concrete wall.

You can make mosaic murals on foam-core backer board and mount these backers onto wooden fences with screws, but that is less than ideal for several reasons, and the weight could cause the fence to lean if its posts aren’t securely anchored. That is why we recommend mounting mosaics directly on masonry surfaces (brick, stone, or concrete).

Masonry surfaces need to be cleaned and possibly smoothed before the mosaic is mounted, but that isn’t too difficult, and it is well worth doing if you want the mosaic to last any time at all. Continue reading →

Mosaic Hummingbird

Repeating Motifs and Abstract Mosaics

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Repeating simple designs or motifs is an effective way to make iconic compositions that catch the eye, and you can take this technique to its extreme to produce abstract art where the pattern itself becomes the subject of the art and not just a tool for rendering figures.

Karla Conmy’s River Meanders mosaic is a good example of repeating motifs taken to the level of abstraction, and Sally Scardino’s Hummingbird mosaic is a good example of using a repeated motif to make a figurative composition stronger. Continue reading →

civil-rights-mural-in-progress

Civil Rights Mural Created At MAS Warehouse

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Mosaic Art Supply tries to hire only professional artists from a working-class background, which means people who pursued their art because they were passionate about it and not merely because they had inherited some form of income. This means our workers have various  skills and intellectual interests that inform their artwork and make them better employees all around, especially when it comes to advising customers on how to make their art safer or more durable or more interesting.

Living Melody Collective

Living Melody Collective five female artists raising awareness in Atlanta.

One of our amazing employees Angela Bortone has created a multimedia mural for the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Angela did this work as part of the Living Melody Art Collective, who are five female artists working in Atlanta to raise awareness of social issues through performance and visual art. I am proud to say that the work of creating the mural was done at the Mosaic Art Supply warehouse. Continue reading →

micromosaic-adam-before-grout-close

Micro-Mosaic Jewelry

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Adam and his sister Teneisha of Toni Craft made a video of their micro-mosaic jewelry project using deep-bezel jewelry findings and stained glass, which we also sell as assortments called Mosaic Art Glass, because the colors were selected to be fairly opaque when mounted on an opaque surface.

Stained Glass or Recycled Glass Tile?

Instead of stained glass, I prefer to cut small pieces from recycled glass mosaic tile, which cuts much more cleanly with less waste because it is made by fusing glass powder, which results in a more homogeneous composition. Swirled stained glass might generate more waste and odd sharp slivers because it breaks along the veins of the swirls, but there are reasons to use it in spite of the scrap. For starters, stained glass is more sparkling than recycled glass tile because it is semi-translucent AND it has interesting variegated colors. Besides, for micro-mosaics, you only need a tiny amount of material, and so waste isn’t a problem, especially if you save it for glass fusing. Continue reading →

Mosaic St. Michael the Archangel

Mosaic Saints, Angels, and Icons

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Historically, mosaic icons were made with traditional materials like smalti, marble, and gold leaf glass. Those traditional mosaic materials might be preferred if you are trying to make a reproduction that looks historically accurate, but they are more expensive and more difficult to work with.

Do You Need Smalti?

If you have any latitude in choosing your materials, remember that it is possible to make striking and realistic images using ordinary vitreous glass mosaic tile, which is both affordable and easy to work with.

Vitreous is the same thickness as the gold leaf glass we sell, and so you could still incorporate gold in your icon if you decided to nix the smalti and stone. In fact, it would be easier to use our gold leaf glass with vitreous than with the thicker smalti and stone.

Continue reading →

Mosaic Street Number Plaque

Mosaic Letters and Numerals

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You can make mosaic street numbers and signs using a grid, but mosaics made from irregular shapes of non-gridded tesserae are more interesting, especially if you use concentric andamento for the background surrounding the figures.

Sara Sommers emailed us some pictures of her mosaic street number plaque, and it is made from cut pieces of tile in strongly contrasting colors. It is definitely worth checking out if you are thinking of making a piece with large mosaic letters or numerals.

Contrasting Colors

For starters, Sara uses strong color contrast between her numerals and background, which is critical for making eye-catching art. She also uses multiple related colors and variegated patterns instead of solid monochromatic color fields. Continue reading →