I frequently have the thought that the hardest part of making art is planning what to do. Once that’s done, then you get to do the fun part of actually creating it. I think I spent the better part of an afternoon thinking up and researching my plan for mosaic #2.

I’m not really a person who believes in spirit animals, but if I was, a fox would be mine for sure. So I knew I wanted to do a fox, but I wanted to put it in some setting that was sort of fanciful or mystical. Inspiration is an odd thing, and for some reason, “Hey Diddle Diddle” popped into my head and soon I had the image of a fox jumping over the moon.

Here’s my sketch:

You can see I’ve already taped the sticky paper down and began by laying down some of the facial features. Remember I always have to put the most intricate and important parts down first.

And were these little face pieces intricate! To move around pieces this small, I used tweezers and a dental scaler. Vitreous glass isn’t too bad but little stained glass shards can be SHARP! By the end of the class I had seventeen ( I counted) teeny tiny cuts from accidentally brushing my hand over them. Next time I’ll be more careful!

Visually, I really liked the fox jumping over the moon in a rightward direction, like in my sketch. But with indirect method mosaic making, you end up reversing the image in the end. But ah HA! The ever-resourceful Cindy had a simple solution to this problem: the Double Reverse Method. When I completed my layout, all I would need to do is stick a second sheet of contact paper over the top of the mosaic, rub vigorously to stick the tesserae down to it, then flip the mosaic over and peel off the original sheet of sticky paper. Brilliant!

The one and only challenge with double-reverse is the texture on the vitreous glass. The texture is on the back, and with double-reverse you naturally put the back sides of tiles down onto the sticky paper. But the bumpy, ridged texture on the backs of the vitreous pieces caused them to annoyingly wobble and even detach themselves when other pieces would bump them. So, I had to do a lot of delicate tweezer work to keep these wobblers in place.

Here I’ve added more pieces to the body. The colored bits are mainly stained glass (flat on both sides and NOT wobble-prone, thank goodness) while the black is vitreous. I had to do the feet twice, on my first attempt I made the toes comically huge:

My table-mate Maria and I had a good laugh about that. Good thing I was using the indirect method or my fox would have been stuck with clown feet.

After some more work, the fox body is done:

Then I proceeded on to the moon, the green grass, and the night sky. I was particularly excited to do a night sky because I was looking forward to getting all impressionistic and Van Gogh with it. There’s a mosaic Cindy made with a snowshoe hare in front of a beautiful night sky that was also an inspiration. If you go to this page and scroll about halfway down, you will see it, right underneath the penguins.

About halfway through the grass I realized that I had set up a really big challenge for myself. Because you see, grass is thin. Very thin, and long. So to make it look realistic I had to cut a bunch of really long, thin shards and stick them all down in a natural-looking way. But of course, pieces of grass crisscross each other all the time, so I was forever cutting the long shards in half so one of them could appear to cross behind another. To make matters worse, some of the pieces were vitreous glass, and their bumpy backs were making them tip over and wobble all over the place. Not to mention, I needed to put in a background of impressionistic night sky behind the grass, which meant I had to fill in the spaces between the shards with even smaller, more randomly shaped bits. OY. Maria was having similar issues with her own piece across the table from me, & we took to calling the teeny random pieces “crumbs.” The fact that we found this as hilarious as we did is a testament to how slap-happy the mind can get after tweezering tiny glass pieces all night long.

Anyhow, I worked hard, and filled in every tiny speck of space. One really important thing I considered while placing the tesserae was contrast. I needed to make sure each individual part of the drawing would stand out and “read,” rather than blending in with what was around it. One example is that I deliberately kept the night sky lighter around the fox’s black legs and feet, so that they wouldn’t literally vanish into thin air. Here is the final layout:

All that tweezering paid off. Now it needed to be set onto the board and grouted.

And voila! I picked black grout for this, to help keep the night sky nice and dark. I think it gave a nice air of drama and magic. Then I painted the margin of the hardibacker board midnight blue. I took this picture out in natural sunlight, which brightens up the colors a bit more than looking at it indoors.

Here is a close-up of that pesky grass section:

See those tiny turquoise crumbs? Yikes. And here is a close-up of the finished fox and moon:

People who have looked at this have told me that they see a fox drinking by a stream, or a fox jumping in a field with the moon behind it. I like that people have come up with different takes on the image. Do you have a different one?

I keep talking about making this post because I. LOVE. MOSAICS now and I can’t wait to tell you all about it! So I won’t! Wait to tell you, I mean. Here goes!

This post could also be titled Pictures Extraordinaire because, like some overly enthusiastic parent, I took about one hojillion photos of each mosaic as it slowly developed. Hopefully you will be just as interested as I was in seeing the fascinating way mosaics come together. If not, here is a really funny picture of a capybara you can look at instead.

My instructor for this class was the super-personable and talented Cynthia Fisher. She is a full-time mosaic artist, and her work is as intricate as it is gorgeous. You can check it out at her website. What I really loved most about Cindy was the down-to-earth and good-humored attitude she brought to the class. A lot of times with art-making, you find procedures that are finicky, complex, and rely on obscure and/or expensive materials and precise conditions. Not so with Cindy! She was all about finding the most accessible, affordable, and simplest ways to accomplish our goals. As a person who considers herself pretty practically minded, I found that totally refreshing. It also gave rise to a general atmosphere of camaraderie and fun in our classroom, which made the whole experience even better.

Coming over from ceramics, I’m used to my artistic process being finicky, time-sensitive, and breakable. But, as Cindy pointed out, one of the cool things about mosaics is: fundamentally, they’re already broken. I think the looser, more spontaneous way of working, without freaking out about the work’s fragility, was really liberating.

We began each mosaic with a preliminary drawing, that acted as a guide telling us where to place the tiles (or tesserae.) I drew a robin’s nest:

Now I had always thought of mosaics as a very planned process, because I was imagining that as you worked, you would glue each individual tessera down in place. That is one way to do mosaics, it’s called the Direct Method. But, Cindy’s technique is to lay a sheet of Frosty contact (sticky) paper over the drawing, sticky-side up. This way, when you lay the tesserae down, they are held in place by the sticky paper, but not so firmly that you can’t move them around. This let us be a lot more spontaneous and allowed for more editing of the design as we worked. This way is called the Indirect Method.

One important detail I had to remember with this method, though, is that the side of the design that is facing up will eventually become the back of the mosaic: it’s the side that gets affixed to the backing board. (There is one way around that but I’ll get to it in the next post.) So, I had to keep in mind that my final piece would be a mirror image of my drawing. This also meant that if any of the tesserae I was working with had a “front” and a “back” side (like mirror glass does), I had to remember to put the “front” side down on the sticky paper so it would be face-up in the end. *Whew!* Anybody else noticing a theme of stuff continually being in reverse in all my Arrowmont classes??

Anyhow, let me show you the tesserae we were working with! Cindy mainly focused the class on working with vitreous glass. It comes in little squares that are textured on one side, and smooth on the other. It’s semitransparent, with this almost grainy look to it. However, a lot of the students in the class were stained glass artists, and they brought stained glass scraps that they generously shared with everyone. Here’s a picture showing green vitreous tiles on the left and green stained glass fragments on the right:

Naturally, since Arrowmont has some of the most amazing and well-equipped studios anywhere around, they had all sorts of fancy glass grinders and cutters that cut the glass with water! Like, a super-powered jet of water! Glass newbie that I was, I was pretty amazed at that one. But, we mostly ignored all that expensive stuff and just used a pair of wheeled tile nippers, a tool that costs about $20. After chopping up a nice pile of glass bits, we were ready to lay down the tesserae!

Here is the beginning progress with the nest and leaves. If you look closely, you can see a mix of vitreous and stained glass pieces.

I learned from Cindy that I should always approach the mosaic by doing the more important and more intricate parts of the image first. That way, those bits get the clearest outline and definition in the finished piece, whereas the background can be allowed to get a little more random.

Here I’ve started laying in some of the background: some pale taupe tree branches and a blue sky. If you look around the outer edge of the image you can see where the Frosty contact paper is taped down to a piece of cardboard backing. My sketch is sandwiched in between the cardboard and sticky paper.

Annnnd here’s the finished layout!

Now the piece needed to be attached to the backing board (we used hardibacker board) with thinset. I used a notched trowel to spread some thinset on the board, then lowered the board down onto the mosaic. After it dried, I got to peel off the cardboard & contact paper and see my image reversed for the first time!!

Buuuut sadly I didn’t take a picture of that. I grouted it first, THEN took the picture!

TA-DAAA!!! I chose a medium gray grout color for this one, which really helped bring the image together. I also painted the “margin” of hardibacker board a fresh green color, and went out and took this photo in the natural sunlight.

Honestly, I was shocked that this came out as well as it did. I remember how my first pottery and sculptures looked, and comparatively, they were not nearly as pleasant as this! So with that unexpected success under my belt, I was hungry to make more mosaics!! I think the next one deserves its own post so stay tuned!

I’m all settled back in Kentucky and couldn’t be more excited to get into my new studio space! I was lucky enough to be offered the position of Artist in Residence for the School of Craft at Hazard Community and Technical College this fall.

So far, I have seen the studio but haven’t had a chance to set up yet. That should happen in the coming weeks. Can’t wait!!!! I will keep you all posted as progress is made!

I have one more Arrowmont post to share with you, about what was hands down the class that exceeded my expectations the most: mosaics! Honestly, I may have found another life passion to rival ceramics, books, volleyball, and cooking. Yes, that’s right. I was pretty impressed myself. Next time I should be able to tell you all about it!