Mosaic Coasters

Our shipment of hardwood bases for making mosaic coaster recently arrived, and I just now added them to our website. We have bases for making square mosaic coasters and round mosaic coasters, and these are great project ideas for someone wanting to make a mosaic miniature.

The coaster bases are made in the USA from cherry hardwood that has been cut out with a laser so that the sides have an attractive burnt wood finish.

In the product descriptions for these, I included some instructions for how to make your own mosaic design on them. My instructions emphasize the need to evaluate your design to make sure you don’t have any details smaller than the smallest piece of tile you can cut. To do this, I always find the smallest detail in my design and cut up some tile and arrange it to form the detail. If I discover that it is too difficult to cut the tile that small, then I know I need to change the scale of my design by cropping it or simplifying it in some way. This is important for creating mosaic art in general, but it is particularly important when you start trying to make mosaic miniatures like this. It just doesn’t make sense to invest a lot of time in the rest of the mosaic only to get to the most detailed part (which is often a key focal point in the design) and discover that you can’t render it very well because it is too small.

Here is my mosaic skull coaster again. I am reluctant to describe it as micro mosaic because this is really nothing compared to the insanely detailed work that the micro artists turn out. After all, this is a coaster, not a design on a pinky ring!