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Mosaic Door First Full Revision
My Mosaic Door Project was something I had never done before: combining a work of art that was being made for magical/spiritual reasons with a commitment to FINALLY start doing a good job of photographing my artwork as I work and creating good teaching examples. I’m the guy that has never photographed vacations and wilderness…
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“Crazy Good Art”
Sometimes I feel like a thoughtless child when I catch myself using expressions that show a lack of sensitivity for people suffering. Other times I feel like the expression in question has some insight or specitivity when used in certain contexts, no matter how overused or unfortunate the term might be in general. “Crazy good”…
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Mosaic Mural on Tile Backer Board
Artists Patricia Cream and Leah Mitchell recently completed an outdoor mosaic mural mounted on foam-core tile backer board, and they took excellent photos of the work in progress. Each major step in the process is shown, including the french-cleat hanging brackets used to mount the mosaic to the cinder-block wall. The mosaic mural is also…
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Two Mosaic Safety Tips
A stainless-steel ruler and a spray-bottle filled with water are all you need to avoid the most common injury and the most serious risk associated with creating mosaic artwork.
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Mosaic Patterns as Rough Maps
Most details in a mosaic are improvised and are not specified in the pattern. If so, then what is the purpose of a mosaic pattern? Like a rough sketch on a canvas to be painted, the purpose of a mosaic pattern is primarily to specify key lines and proportions, to be a rough map of…
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White Grout: The Floral Print Aesthetic
Artist Masha Leder‘s mixed pique-assiette architectural mosaics using white grout are so good I wanted to name this blog article “In Praise of White Grout.” I have been hoping more people would email me some photos of their white-grout mosaic artwork ever since I started posting about avoiding white grout in mosaic images, meaning figurative…
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Value Contrast in Mosaic
There’s a reason art instructors recommend working in monochrome or black and white before working in color. The reason is that contrast in value (light versus dark) is more important than contrast in hues, and it is easier to learn mastery of value contrast before you complicate the process with different hues. I am self-taught,…
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Pattern to Mosaic: Design Evolution
I thought I would share this particular studio photo because it shows the evolution of an improvised mosaic design, in this case a sailing ship. It also showed ad hoc changes to the pattern after it was already taped beneath clear contact paper. A mosaic is not a drawing, and we call rendering an existing…
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Mosaic Door Progress
This is an update on my Mosaic Door project built from a “series of smalls“, which is the most effective way to improve artistic confidence and ability. A “series of smalls” is more than a simplistic example of practice makes perfect. You can practice by painting works of all sizes and painting many different types…
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Santa Fe Rail Trail Mosaic
Artist Julie Deery is working on a mosaic mural for the wall of the Santa Fe Rail Trail. The location for the mosaic mural is 130 feet of cinderblock wall along the Rail Trail just north of Siringo Road in Santa Fe. The theme of the project is “Generations” with the goal of having community…
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Making Tiles from Stained Glass
We haven’t been able to keep our Smalti stocked very well over the past year because it has quadrupled in cost after the tariffs and freight gouging and the large factory price increase. I have been fretting about that a lot recently, and so Natalija reminded my how much cheaper and easier it is to…
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Making Mosaic Letters from Beads
Glass Seed Beads in the 3.7mm size can be strung on short pieces of wire to make letters, numerals, and symbols in mosaic artwork. Step #1. Find Wire Any variety of metal wire can be used, but copper taken from stranded electrical wire is the easiest to find and use: