Top tips from mosaic school

Here are some of mine and Nathalie’s (fellow course member) top tips from the West Dean course (there are many more!):

1. Put PVA glue in fridge to make it gloopy enough for sticking on 3d surfaces
2. Tumble gin bottles (or other waste glass!) to make beautiful tumbled glass for mosaicing
3. Use a swivel chair at your workstation so that you can turn away from the table to cut
4. When cutting hold the nippers on your lap and cut using the muscles in your upper arm
5. Draw pencil guidelines on your substrate, especially when doing spirals (or other complicated flows) so that you don’t create unintentional counter-flows with your grout lines
6. If something is going wrong, look at least 3 pieces back as that’s where it probably started.
7. Be aware of what your eye is doing when you are creating your piece.
8. Get a good range of tools to make your work easier – become knowledgeable of the variety of cutting tools (two-wheeled, Starrets…) and check out sculpting tools (such as scrapers, potters needles etc…) to help you clean up and unpick work.

My piece is developing…

Oh, and while I was away it looks like Isabella has done some more mosaicing of her own. She has added to the piece I posted a pic of a couple of week back – can you spot the difference? Gosh, she is using advanced techniques already! Stacking and tilting her tiles (no need to teach this girl about texture and reflectivity!)