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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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Blue Crab Mosaic Relic
My dear old friend Jay Brown had been requesting a mosaic of a blue crab for years, and this past week Jay had his official investiture as a federal judge, and so I decided it was time. Art with a Capital A Normally I avoid bespoke commissions like the plague because I have trouble keeping…
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Mosaic Art Exhibition
Janet Crawford has owned and operated Fog Forest Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada since 1984. The gallery’s current exhibit is called “Piece Works” and has been in the making for several years. As the name implies, the exhibit features works of art that were created by assembling small pieces, and the exhibit itself is…
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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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Subtle Mosaic Mandalas
New Mexico artist Debbi Murzyn emailed me some pictures of her mosaic mandalas that she made using Native American symbols as the center of the designs. She says she didn’t realize her cultural faux pas until she had completed them, and I think she was a little surprised by the fact that she was surprised.…
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Mosaic Stepping Stone Path
This is an ode to the mosaic stepping stone. There is much to praise: Each stone can be its own design or part of a theme, or even part of a larger mosaic image made by placing similar stepping stones side by side. Stepping stones allow you to build a larger design incrementally, from paths…
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Drainage Concerns for Garden Mosaics
Artist Sandra Christie of Married Metals emailed me some questions about an outdoor mosaic she wanted to make for her garden area in Connecticut. The mosaic will be on a 50-square-foot slab of concrete that will be poured to make a short walkway into a fenced garden area. Sandra’s initial questions didn’t emphasize drainage in…
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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…