How To Make A Home Mosaic Art Studio

Avoid Studio Obsession

Setting up and organizing your studio or corner workspace can become an end unto itself and just one more thing that keeps you from working on your art. Keep in mind that great works of art have been created under terrible working conditions and with minimal tools and equipment. The most important thing you can do for your studio is to make sure you work on your art often and frequently. Incremental improvements will be made over time on an as-needed basis as you notice problems with inadequate lighting, incorrect work surface heights and the other general principles of laying out an art studio.

For many years, my art was made on the floor of whatever small apartment I was living in at the time. My workspace was cramped, and often the project had to be cleaned up and put away immediately after each work session to make room for day-to-day activities like laundry or simply to be able to walk through the tiny room.

In the example below, I show rolling tables, rolling shelves and other moveable fixtures that can be rearranged to accommodate large sculptural mosaics. This is not how my home art space was set up to make mosaics back in the day, and this probably isn’t how you should set up yours (unless you live in a large warehouse with concrete floors.)

Use What You Have (And What Can Be Gotten For Little Cost)

Instead of custom-built low tables on wheels, you can use what I once did: a plastic recycling tote turned upside down and slid into position as needed. Old coffee tables and end tables from garage sales are also useful. Keep in mind that in addition to your main work surface, it really helps to have one or two auxiliary tables on the side. This arrangement of tables creates a highly efficient C-shaped manufacturing cell where the operator can reach a wide range of materials merely by pivoting.

Depending on how many different colors or materials you are working with, you may find that one of your two side tables should be an open shelf instead. An old bookshelf made for small paperbacks is an effective and cheap solution as are shelves mounted on a wall if your workspace is in a corner.

If at all possible, have your main work table set against a window so that you can have natural light and look up from time to time to rest your eyes from the intense up-close work

A C-Shaped Manufacturing Cell

mosaic-studio
This particular mosaic studio was set up for standing artist who was working intermittently between packing orders for shipment and making “last-minute” changes before grouting.

In the picture above, notice the main work surface is augmented by an open shelf to the right and a smaller lower table to the right (almost out of camera view). Notice how the small plastic containers of tile could not be reached by a seated artist. If the artist were seated, those containers of tile would be better places by arranging them on the shelf, preferably a more efficient shelf with more levels than the one shown here. The point of the C-shaped manufacturing cell is to arrange things where the artist can reach them without getting up or stretching.

Use A Low Table For Seated Artists

low-mosaic-table
I’ve built some low tables on wheels that are about knee high, which allows a seated artist to position tiles and see. The artist does not need to bend over or reach the far side of the mosaic. Instead, the mosaic can be spun on the table, or the table itself can be spun.

Mosaic is different from painting in that it is best done while the surface is lying horizontally, and this presents a problem in how step back and see the work as a whole as you are working on it. Sure, you can clean off the tools and loose pieces of tile and prop the mosaic up vertically, but this just isn’t practical.

More importantly, it’s difficult to judge how far you are spacing each tile you place if you are looking at the mosaic from a low angle. You need to be looking at it from above. Conventional desks and worktables don’t allow this because they are too high unless you are standing, and that doesn’t make sense for hours at a time. The solution is to use a work surface much lower than what you would use for most other art activities. Old coffee tables are just about the right height and make near ideal mosaic work surfaces, particularly the square ones.

Can You Tell This Picture Has Been Staged?

mosaic-studio-table
Large work surfaces allow you to lay out tools and materials and still rotate and move the mosaic to work on different areas.

Once you work on a mosaic, the above picture should make you chuckle with its artificial neatness. I’ve laid out all the nippers, palette knives, tweezers, etc. like surgical instruments. Keep in mind that surgeons have interns and nurses and even other surgeons to assist. That means you have to keep things findable yourself.

That doesn’t mean rows, but it does mean rough zones that radiate out from your current site of active work. The zone can be as simple as tools right, blues top, greens left.

How To Manage Your Immediate Work Area

The place on the mosaic where you are actively mounting tile tends to get ringed with the tools you are currently using (glue, rag, tweezer, pick) and bins of the different colors most relevant to that location. Try to keep the stuff you aren’t using most swapped toward the back of its zone.

Also if you’re like me, you will want to create a special zone where you periodically slam down something you’ve had to search for a minute or two to find. If it keeps getting lost, put it in the special zone.

Why You Can Only Be So Disorganized

You will find yourself reaching for a palette knife as quick as any surgeon reaching for a scapple when you need to do stuff like scoop runny wet mortar before it drips onto an unsealed 250 myo limestone ammonite fossil to stain it forever. You have to work carefully and deliberately and quickly when you fabricate a surface from artifacts, and you have to know what to do when things go wrong.

And things do go wrong when you work with wet concrete and stuff easily stained by concrete.

You can be in a good rhythm, but then you will drop something, and before you know it, you will  suddenly have concrete on both hands, plus the past 6 things you touched, including whatever you are currently holding, which will continue to get dirtier until you just drop it and accidentally touch you hand to your face or hair in frustration. And then you laugh like a crazy man or cuss or both and spend the next five to ten minutes bathing things and picking concrete out of your eyebrow.

Contain Your Cutting Slivers

You can’t just cut tile, especially glass tile without creating some dangerous slivers and splinters, so this means you can’t indiscriminately hold your cutting tool over your lap or work surface. Cut tile over a tray or plastic tote to help contain the slivers generated by cutting. Totes with some depth like dishpans and unused litter boxes are more effective than flat trays for catching splinters that shoot out instead of merely falling.

Why is this important? Random slivers lying invisible on surfaces cause more cuts than handling the tile. Inevitably you touch your finger, hand or forearm to the surface, and you have cut yourself before you know what is happening. The cuts are usually surprisingly deep given the size of the slivers. I’ve had one roll a deep cut all the way across my palm when I foolishly brushed a seemingly clean table with my bare ungloved hand.

Keep your shop vacuum in the cell of the workstation if possible and use if frequently with a counter brush like the kind we sell.

I have a wire mesh fitting over my vacuum hose, and it makes the vacuum a lot more useful. I use the wire mesh fitting for vacuuming the dust out of all my small part containers without having to remove the parts: mosaic tile, screws, hardware, fossils, teeth, arrowheads, artifacts. This is huge when you have a room with thousands of open-top containers of small parts.

How To Make A Mesh Vacuum Fitting

I made the mesh fitting from 3/8″ hardware cloth (galvanized steel wire mesh) folded over the end of a hose pipe salvaged from a dead shop vac. The wire mesh was folded under at the outer edges, and I spent a few minutes with with the needle nose pliers nipping and tucking under the sharp ends. Then I wrapped it about three times with duct tape.

 What Your Really Need To Know About Duct Tape

Just because you are using duct tape doesn’t mean that your work has to be “halfast” and disposable.  You can form up some useful things with duct tape. Also, the environmental cost of making duct tape  and disposing it when worn out means that it is actually a very expensive material and should not be used carelessly.

The nozzle I made was wrapped about three times with duct tape. If you leave the sharps turned out, you could wrap a whole roll on there and still get poked if you ever pressed down on it good.

Tools List

mosaic-studio-tools
Mosaic tools arranged to the right of Dorothy Stucki’s in-progress mosaic “To Begin and End With Nothing.”

In the tools laid out above, some are more clearly visible than others, so my list begins with the less than obvious and the less visible:

  • misting water bottle (not shown)
  • glue tray for dipping tiles in glue -use plastic lid  (not shown)
  • tray of cotton swabs
  • tray of assorted metal detail tools: dental picks, tweezers of different type, small pocket screwdrivers, palette knives, butter knives, spoons
  • palette knives
  • putty knives
  • pencil cup full of odd tools: scissors, toothbrushes, pencils, markers, box cutter
  • marble file
  • mosaic glass cutter
  • tile nipper

Grout Mixing Tools

I don’t mix my grout or thinset mortar up in the workstation where I actually position the tile. I prefer to mix up and wash up in a separate place, preferably where things can be hosed down without the possibility of getting concrete in any drains. For this reason, your grout and grout mixing supplies don’t have to be stored around your mosaic workstation.

mosaic-studio-grouting
Grout mixing tools for smaller batches include small digital kitchen scale, measuring cups, buckets, pails, rubber gloves and a counter brush. Note the white tray to the left is the catching tray for the mounted compound nipper above it.

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8 responses to “How To Make A Home Mosaic Art Studio”

  1. MH Avatar
    MH

    Hi, Great post. Thanks for all the tips. I have been doing mosaic on and off for a while, mostly with found objects and keep my ‘inventory’ in buckets with an sample taped to the outside (ex. wine corks, bottle caps, etc.). Which works ok ,but not great. I have just started making more traditional mosaics with the glass purchased at glass store. I find it hard to manage all of the different colors of glass, and because they are all flat the bucket method doesn’t make a lot of sense. Do you have any tips for storage of the glass. Do you just use shallow plastic bins with lids so you can stack them, and still see colors through? Or plastic drawer units from craft store? Right now everything is just piled together in one box, so I need a plan, thanks for any advice.

    1. Joe Moorman Avatar

      I like using recycled glass jars arranged densely on a book shelf, preferably pint-sized and quart-sized jars. Of course, it’s not practical to reach down into the jars to access the material. Instead, when I need to use that color material, I pour the jar out into a tray. The purpose of the glass jars arranged by color on a compact shelf is so you can see your “whole box of crayons” and pick exactly what you need without having to dig through opaque boxes or chests or buckets or pour things out just to see if it is the right color.

      If space is an issue, you could consider using smaller jars, such as recycled baby-food jars on a much smaller shelf.

      Here is my mosaic area at the warehouse, which includes rolling tables and other things that wouldn’t be practical for a home studio, but it does show how smalti and other glass tile can go in glass jars on a shelf.

  2. Joanne Avatar

    This was a very informative post to pass along to new mosaic artists. I have arranged something that follows many of your outlines but is very compact due to the space I have available. One thing I always tell people when they ask about setting up a work area is … if at all possible, try to select a space with a door. That way if you’re in the middle of a project you can keep out dogs, cats, kids, people who won’t appreciate the “process.” For now I am using several of those smaller lettuce boxes from the grocery store (the kind they put fancy mixes into) as they are relatively flat, easy to stack and you can see what colors are inside. Smalti I am storing in the large clear plastic jars that hold mixed nuts. Both of these are free for the asking.

  3. baselle Avatar

    In the re-purposing spirit, I buy and eat a lot of cut fruit at the grocery store, and have discovered that several of the larger clear plastic containers work nicely for me. They also have clear lids that if you tip them over, can serve as clear trays. Semi spendy because when fruit is out of season, but if your new year’s resolution is to eat healthier, you get a side benefit.

  4. Ramona Avatar
    Ramona

    Thanks. This is just what I needed. I am in the process of claiming a section of our front room to set up a space. I tend not to do any mosaics or art because where I have it set up is in the barn and it’s cold here. We live in N.H. and our garage/barn isn’t heated. I will return to this site to get more ideas. I skimmed through it but was so glad and hopeful to see it. After a long winter, hitting my 50’s (midlife crisis), and feeling frustrated about my pent up creativity this is a help to me!!

  5. Melissa Avatar

    I am new to this but very excited with lots of ideas. Setting up my area now. The produce containers is such a good idea ! And free ! I can see that space to have the diff colors in sight to identify is going to be a challenge for sure.I plan to use multiple mixed medias to make my designs.
    Keeping the area safe for furbabies will also be a challenge as my workshop is located in a room in my barn where the BarnCats frequent. Do not want there little paws walking over any glass shards.

  6. Lauren Avatar
    Lauren

    Hi Joe! Thanks again so much for these articles! My studio table has a very nice maple tabletop. Do you recommend covering the table for mosaic work, to protect it from scratches, etc.? Thank you!

    1. Joe Moorman Avatar
      Joe Moorman

      I use large sheets of cardboard. Make sure the table has no grit on it before the cardboard is put in place.

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