Mosaic Butterflies

I just did my first installation in a long time. I had forgotten how much fun it is. The day was hot and sunny and I was dirty and sweaty. I love working under those conditions! My hands are all cut up from working with the glass and still stained midnight blue from the grout.

I have a 70 foot long cement wall that runs the length of my backyard. The cement is lumpy and bumpy and was poorly made from the beginning. I have wanted to mosaic it but it always looked like it would be a tremendous investment in time and materials. Also, I like working in glass and I just couldnt see a way to directly mosaic onto that wall. So I came up with a plan. I decided to cut individual pieces out of Hardiboard, mosaic them in my shop and then cement them to the wall - leaving only the grouting to be done on site. I don't know if this is simply reinventing the wheel and millions of people do it this way every day but for me it was an experiment.
I figured: what the heck, it's my wall!Here is a picture of the wall. This isnt even half of it but you may be able to see the roughness of it. I had to use a very thick coating of Thinset in places to make the work area as flat as possible. Again, maybe it isn't kosher to use Thinset in a place where traditional cement would be used but Thinset IS pretty cement-like so I figured why not. Here is the first butterfly stuck to the wall. You can see the chalk outlines I did to get an idea how they would fit next to each other. It was somewhat messy looking because I had used white Thinset and it stood out like a sore thumb. Not good. I bought grey Thinset for the next butterfly and "painted" over the white that showed around the first one too. Much better. This picture shows the length I had to go to keep the second butterfly in place! Tape and plywood wedged against it for hours did the trick pretty well.Here they are drying.And here they are finished. Not perfect by a long shot but I guarantee I will become perfect! I had been so nervous to try this because once it's done, it's immovable! But I had totally forgotten how much fun it is! I am working on a frog to go on the wall next and have all kinds of ideas for more pieces. I'll keep you posted.

My Mosaic Style

I stumbled onto mosaics as an art medium only two years ago. And then I latched onto the idea of doing mosaic nudes about a year after that!
At the time, I just wanted to try the medium itself and thought that the female nude is the most cliched subject in all of art. Using that form, I felt, would free me from having to really come up with some special subject. I just wanted to concentrate on learning mosaics first, making actual "art", second.
But people, it has turned out, really like my nudes. I get a lot of compliments for the way that I capture the 3 dimensionality of the body. At first I was taken aback by the praise and wondered what people were actually seeing when the looked at these pieces.
The female body is curvy side to side and front to back. And the joy and challenge of getting people to see and feel that physical volume is the artistry of it for me.
I've been asked to teach my technique many many times. So here is a series of pictures taken of a recent project.

First I draw the figure based on an idea, image or some feeling I've experienced. Then I trace it onto a substrate of either plywood or, if it's for outdoors, Hardiboard. Then I cut it out with a simple jigsaw. I seal the wood with bonderizer, which you can buy at a tile store, or with white acrylic paint.

To begin, I choose from which angle my light source will come. For this piece I decided the light source would come from the left.

I used regular mirror to delineate where the highest points of the body would be. To stay consistent, I do the entire mirror phase first. To the eye, more light hits where there are larger pieces of mirror, less light where there are smaller pieces of mirror.

Then I decide on my color palette. I choose a high or bright range. Colored mirror works best for that because the color sparkles and glitters in the light.

Next I choose the mid-range of colors. These tessarae should be non-mirrored but can have rough surfaces or mottled coloring so they pick up and reflect light in odd and interesting ways.

And last I decide on the deep colors to use in the shadows on the body, where the light would shine the least.

On this piece, my highlights are red and gold mirrored glass, the mid-tones are flat yellows and oranges, and my deep tones are blues. A very simple palette.

Then I just keep in mind the shape of the limbs and muscles and the movement of the actual "personality" that I want to convey.

You can see in these pictures how the tessarae follow the curves of the breast and thighs, the long muscles of the arms, the bulk of the hips, etc.

Then I throw in some non-sequitors - series of tessarae here and there that don't make sense for a body but serve to keep the viewer interested. After all, they know it's a nude!

You can try this style on a basic shape like an apple. Just make sure it has ample volume with bright highlights and deep shadows.

The finished piece, and it's companion, are waiting to be grouted. I'll post them soon.