Category: Art Review
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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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Correcting Skew with Photoshop
Recent blog articles have required that I use Adobe’s Photoshop software to correct the foreshortening and skewed angles in the original photographs sent in by the artists. You can avoid foreshortening and skewed angles when photographing your artwork using the tips I have at the end of my post about frames for mosaic art. However,…
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Peacock Redux
My recent blog post about Lonnie Parson’s Peacock mosaic was a cautionary tale about what can happen when you fail to take at least one definitive photo of your finished mosaic. I didn’t want that blog post to be about how to photograph your artwork in optimal light with no foreshortening. I wanted the post…
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Artistic Style in Mosaic
Artist Ivana Sorrells works at Mosaic Art Supply, and she made a couple of small mosaic plaques using our vitreous glass tile, stained glass, and 8-inch plywood mosaic backer boards, plus a few odd findings from a few other types of mosaic glass. Ivana hadn’t worked in mosaic before these pieces, but she gave it…
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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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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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Mosaics in a Painterly Style
Paints can be blended to any shade or hue, but the mosaic medium requires that an artist render an image in a limited set of fixed colors. The color palettes of molded glass tile product lines are limited to 40 to 60-ish colors, and this limitation seems to encourage novice artists to work in a…
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Large Mixed-Media Mosaic Mural
Artist Dianne Stearns and her students have created an impressive mixed-media mosaic mural on the exterior of their school in Tuolumne County, California. Too Much Inspiration The mural is a “regional icons landscape collage,” and so naturally it shows local landmarks and regional archetypes, but when you have El Capitan in Yosemite National Park and…
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Wood Frames For Mosaics
Artist Tanya Boyd emailed me some photos of her mosaics, and all of them were in wooden frames of different types. It reminded me that I am overdue to write up the ways of sourcing wooden frames for mosaics: used frames from paintings or mirrorsframes made using molding and a miter sawframes made from recycled…
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Mosaic Flower Pot Planters
Artist Morgan Halford‘s mosaic flower pot planters are colorful geometric abstracts executed with a spooky level of precision. I like that they are exceptions to my general recommendation to work in a looser fashion in the uniformity of the sizing, shaping, and orienting of tiles. TIP: Most people find that they can render images more…