Mermaid Mosaic Part 2

Henry Wordsworth Longfellow:
Excerpts from The Secret of the Sea

Ah! what pleasant visions haunt me
As I gaze upon the sea!
All the old romantic legends,
All my dreams, come back to me.

Till my soul is full of longing
For the secret of the sea,
And the heart of the great ocean
Sends a thrilling pulse through me.

mosaic on-site, awaiting installation with each numbered section in place

MERMAID MOSAIC PROCESS PART 2

Once the client and designer approved my drawn-up concept, palette and samples, they decided on a 13-1/2” diameter piece. This is quite large as you can see above.

Did you miss Part 1? Even just a quick scan of the images will give you a better understanding of what you see here.

Rob and I set to work enlarging my 12” x 18” sketch to 1/3 of drawing life-size which took about 25 hours over a period of 2 weeks. You may wonder why take the extra step of drawing at 1/3 rather than full size? The reason is that we didn't have a large enough wall space to draw the whole 13' diameter piece!(

One of the most defining steps we take when enlarging the scale from a desktop sketch to life-size or in this case, 1/3 of life-size) is to create the tile shapes. I always want my tile shapes themselves to be beautiful as well as to express the larger form. For instance the mermaid’s face and body are both given dimension through the tile shapes.

You can see this idea below with the mermaid’s hand and the shell around it.

cuts of the sky

I’ve always loved the cutting stage of a mosaic and the gorgeous pieces created from our drawing-cutting from the slabs of wet clay. We cut when the clay slab has sat overnight pressed between 2 pieces of drywall and stiffens to “leather hard”. This state offers the perfect amount of give and stiffness in the clay.

cuts of the mermaid's hair and sea-life within the "half-shell"

To go from drawing to clay, we take the 1/3 drawing and divide it up into small sections. Each section is then enlarged to full size at our local copy shop, drawn onto a wet slab of clay and cut with a scalpel.

below looks like a collage but is all of those enlarged sections pieced back together. We used this for assembling the whole piece at the end

Because this is an exterior installation, we used a porcelain clay body that I had previously tested and found to be frostproof and water-proof. Porcelain can have a clean kind of beauty but is also the most ultra-fussy and high-maintenance material. This particular porcelain presented challenges of illogical shrinkage patterns and sometimes in the firing would warp and contort in ways that made no sense and lead to many pieces having to be cut again. As the project went on, I vowed that this would be the last time I used it!

One of my favorite part of this mosaic is the border. It was the first clear idea I had for the piece and is inspired by seaweed.

More process for this mermaid mosaic to come. I post every 4 days or and I hope you will check my blog again later in the week for part 3!

testing how I would use tile shapes and colors to create motion and dimension in the water