Category: Improving Your Art
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Amazing Commission
I have survived the stress of managing the supply business during the pandemic/supply crisis so far only by allowing myself periods when I get very slack in responding to non-crisis emails. I tell myself I will get back to them eventually, but sometimes eventually is a long time. Most emails that can be ignored for…
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Mosaic Restoration Video
Natalija made a video of her work with artist Angela Bortone in the restoration of a marble mosaic. The mosaic was a reproduction of a detail of Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus, and it was covered in grime and missing tiles. It also needed to be transferred to a new backer. There was a…
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Imperfection as Grout Gap
The Blue Crab mosaic I recently completed is a good example of how to create a grout gap by making use of imperfect cuts instead of spacing the tiles intentionally. The “imperfect cut” method makes the process of creating a mosaic faster, easier, and less tedious -first in the cutting and placing of tiles but…
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Mosaic Grout Rules
Artist Caroline Bommer’s recent Sunset Mosaic is a great example of an exception to the rules of mosaic art that I harp on in all my online content. After seeing the finished mosaic, I actually wanted to title this article, “Don’t Listen to Me. I Don’t Know Anything about Mosaic.” Exceptions to Rules of Art…
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Grid Mosaic Teaching Tool
My 13-year-old son made some mosaics on our 4-inch bamboo coasters with me. His designs are also figurative and iconic, but unlike the mosaics I have been making, his designs use whole uncut tiles. My son’s designs are all Minecraft-inspired images, and so the blocky nature of uncut square 8-mm tiles was perfect: Minecraft-Inspired Mosaics…
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Mosaic Backgrounds & Variegation
In my previous post, I wrote about Peggy Pugh’s excellent use of color variegation and the potential for this technique to cause figures to lose definition when there is variegation in both the figure and the background. In response, artist Jill Gatwood emailed me photos of a student’s work where the problem had caused the…
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Variegated and Mottled Colors for Better Mosaics
I forgot to write about some of the teaching points from Peggy Pugh’s mosaic backsplash. Variegated and mottled colors create more visual interest in mosaic artwork than monochromatic color fields. However, there is a limit to how much variation you can put into an area of color and still render an element as a distinct…
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Mosaic Backsplash for Stove with Hood
Peggy Pugh’s mosaic backsplash makes me wish the vent hood for the range didn’t have to be installed! The backsplash design is a mosaic interpretation of the view from the window opposite to it in Peggy’s kitchen. The view is of Peggy’s flower gardens with Upper Back Bay in Newport, California in the background. Peggy…
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Mosaic Peacock: A Cautionary Tale
My recent blog article about small mosaics has a section at the end that explains how to take catalog-ready photos of mosaic art. My article about mosaic frames includes some discussion about the best light for photographing artwork and the need to avoid foreshortening. I know why the issue is coming up more and more…
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Small Mosaics Update
I have been making some small mosaics on our bamboo mosaic coaster backers, and I wanted to share a photo of the collection so far and talk about some more advantages of working in a series of smalls. Each of these coasters will be a “tile” that is used in a large sculpture that is…
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Sports Logo Mosaic
A stylized logo or pattern is different from a picture of an object. In a picture, the goal is to create a sense of verisimilitude (likeness) by including small details and visual complexity. In a logo, there is an opposite emphasis. To create a logo, images are “posterized” and every element is reduced to monochromatic…
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Curves Not Lines for Better Mosaics
Artist Marianne Limandri’s mosaics are good examples of how to create more interesting designs by thinking in terms of curves instead of straight lines. Straight line segments (or their imperfect representations) occur all the time in nature, from cactus needles all the way up to the endless horizon on the open sea, but they are…