Tag: contemporary mosaic
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Fleur-de-Louisiana: A Study in Subtle Colors
Artist Sharon Thomassie emailed me a photo of her mosaic in progress and asked for advice about choosing color(s) for the background.
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Mosaic Table Insets
Inserting detailed mosaic insets in fields of monochromatic tile is the perfect compromise that allows an artist to make a mosaic table top with original artwork with fine detail without overcommitting time or effort.
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Mosaic Table Alternative
Mosaic tables are great for quick and easy designs: geometric or abstract or loosely executed fun images. Installing original figurative mosaics on a table is not the best idea for several reasons, especially if your design is very detailed.
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Online Mosaic Design Tool
To promote mosaic as a fine art, we encourage people to make their own mosaic designs and to choose non-gridded over gridded designs. Nevertheless, there are many situations that call for naturalistic images, and these are most easily made using a gridded design where each tile is treated as a tiny pixel.
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Abstract Figurative Mosaic Murals
Artist Tracy Pennington makes large mosaic murals in an Abstract Figurative style, and her Springs Park mural in LaGrange, Kentucky is a good example. Tracy’s specific style of Abstract Figurative art is based patterns and textures, which are the mosaic medium’s intrinsic strength. After all, it’s difficult to arrange tiles without the mind seeing different…
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Impressionist Landscape Mosaic Mural
Artist David Hilbertson recently completed his first mosaic and photo-documented the process of making it, which was somewhat of a tour-de-force in terms of using improvisation and working around problems. Even the image itself is more improvised than not, and yet the results are akin to an Impressionist painting or a pixelated photograph.
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Still Life Mosaic Series
Louise Roberts recently emailed me to say that she has been teaching herself mosaic using our blog and that she followed my recommendation to make a series of small mosaics of the same size. She also attached some photos of her mosaics, and they are impressive. To me, her mosaics are yet more proof that…
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Box Turtle Mosaic
This mosaic was made on a temporary surface of clear contact paper. I looked at the shell patterns of countless Eastern Box Turtles. The shell pattern of the turtle in my mosaic is all of them and none of them. I had an interesting problem with the backer for this mosaic. I found a way…
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Temporary Surfaces Versus Mosaic Backers
My article about making patterns for irregularly-shaped mosaics shows other work-in-progress steps for the same mosaic I show here in this post. The mosaic is named for its subject, Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly. It’s about 6 x 7 x 1/2 inches in size. In this article, I show the creation of the temporary surface and…
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Skeleton’s Rib: How to Mosaic Easily
What does a skeleton’s rib teach us about how to make mosaic more easily? It teaches us only one lesson, but that lesson is probably the biggest tip I have for how to make mosaics more easily and with less tedium and frustration.
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The Beauty of Cheating in Art
As artists, we are often hypercritical of our own work and can only see the flaws in our art. Often times these “flaws” are details not even noticed by the viewer, and when the are noticed, they aren’t even perceived as flaws. However, sometimes we really do screw up a detail in an otherwise perfect…
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Blue Jay Mosaic
My most recent mosaic Blue Jay is 10 x 10 inches and made from our American-made stained glass on a mortar stone. This mosaic was made by improvising over a pattern.