Category: Improving Your Art
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Miniature Mosaic: Mountain Valley Twilight
I continue to work on a series of miniature mosaics mounted on what I call my “mortar stones,” which are irregularly-shaped backers made by spreading thinset mortar on 3 or 4 layers of hardware cloth (steel mesh). My latest in the series is my mosaic Mountain Valley Twilight, which is 9 x 6 x 1/2…
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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
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
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
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
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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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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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
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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Secret Tip for Improving Your Mosaics
Mosaic tile is laid one tile at a time, and the process can be distracting artistically. The mind becomes focused on fitting small pieces together instead of seeing the image as a whole. Fortunately there are ways around this problem.
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Make Quick Mosaic Patterns from Any Photo
Recently a friend of mine asked for a mosaic pattern for a kingfisher and the materials to make it. He made this request at the eleventh hour when he discovered that it would be raining the entire weekend of his family’s beach trip. I literally had to get the pattern and the tile shipped the…
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How to Mount a Gapless Mosaic in Thinset Mortar
I just made a video that shows how to mount a mosaic without a grout gap in a bed of thinset mortar. The project task used for the video was mounting the QR Code Mosaic to an outdoor sign backer that made from mortar and hardware cloth. The Video Here’s the video: video: How To…