Susan Crocenzi at Santa Barbara School of Mosaic Art (SBSMA)

I attended another wonderful workshop at SBSMA with the amazing Susan Crocenzi. She has so much talent and creativity! It was a three-day workshop. The first two days we worked with tempered glass, I had a heart/peace sign base that I brought along and after listening to Susan and her wonderful ideas, I came up with a design. The final piece looks much better than the picture but tempered glass is hard to photograph. I'm going to post this now since I see I'm way behind with my blog posts. More on the polymer clay later.

Tanit the Punic Goddess

Goddesses Julie and Jennifer working on marble goddesses

Last weekend I attended a wonderfully informative workshop at Tami Macala's Santa Barbara School of Mosaic Art. My friend Jennifer and I were the only participants, and we were taught the art of indirect mosaic from the renown mosaic artist, Betsy Gallery. Betsy had prepared a paper template for each of us of the goddess Tunit, or Tank as she was sometimes called. Betsy also explained the technique for scaling up a mosaic by transferring lines in small boxes to larger boxes.

We began by mixing up flour, salt and water into a paste which we cooked to create a glue. Then we traced Tunit onto brown paper and then went over the lines with red and black Sharpie markers. The idea was to have the design bleed through to the back of the paper. I was making a stepping stone and Jennifer made a wall hanging as she was here from Colorado and had to tote the finished mosaic home with her.

Betsy provided long strips of various colors of marble which we cut into smaller pieces. Then we began gluing the marble to the paper. It didn't seem like the glue was going to hold but magically it did. We spent the afternoon gluing the marble to our designs

and only got about half way through.

Jennifer

After grouting

Saturday morning we arrived and continued gluing marble to paper. When we finished a little after lunch, we put the mosaic on the paper into the sun to dry. Then we turned them over and, lo and behold, only two or three pieces fell off. So then we stirred up some thinset and carefully put down a layer on our substrates. Next, with another person to help, we inverted the mosaic and placed it marble-side down on the thinset. Then we took a board and mallet and pounded the mable into the thinset. Then we sprayed water on the paper and after a while it was relatively easy to remove. We did lodge a few pieces of marble loose but we just pushed them back into the thinset.

The next morning we returned and viewed our beautiful goddesses. Then we mixed up some charcoal grout and grouted our pieces. And they are beautiful! Here is mine warding off bad juju in front of my porch.

It's Almost April!

Where did the month go? I haven't posted since the beginning of March, and many things have happened since then. But if I try to tell you about everything, I'll never finish this so I'll do one thing at a time.

I attended Laurie Mika's polymer clay class at Tami Macala's Santa Barbara School of Mosaic Art. It was wonderful! My friend Nancy had signed up for the class and then wasn't able to attend so she offered her space in the class to me. Thank you, Nancy!





Laurie is a wonderful teacher and artist. She has written a book entitled Mixed Media Mosaics. I read it over and over and learn something new every time. And by attending the class, I saw some of her techniques first hand and am amazed again. I just wish I could remember how to do them all.

In the class we all made triptyches (works of art divided into three sections) using polymer clay. I am really in awe of the talent I saw around me. As I've said before, I need to actually look at something to give me an idea of what to do, but these women just got started and knocked out incredible pieces.

More later on the rest of the month!

Aged Transfers

Laurie Mika

Finished Triptyches

My triptych - not yet finished

Cats and Suns

This stripey cat was started at Martin Cheek's fusion workshop here at the Santa Barbara School of Mosaic Art. I've finished the gluing and now I'll grout. It's a silly piece, the kind I like a lot. His ears are a bit big but I think it gives him character.

Another thing I notice is that I really like cats, flowers and suns in my mosaics. The piece below was started in the SAMA class about using power tools with your mosaics. I cut the yellow cat out with the power wet saw and decided right away that I would keep on using my ring saws. The saw in the class was large, noisy, expensive and required setup and takedown after each use. And it didn't really cut any faster than the ring saw. But I had a very nice time in the class. I sat next to a really fun person. We shared tools and decided we were going to try to knock the pieces out during the class. I came pretty close. I just needed to finish up the sky when I got home. And there's still grout, of course

This last piece is a Miltonia Orchid. I was going to submit it to the art portion of the Orchid Show here in Santa Barbara but, alas!, it didn't turn out as I'd hoped. The pink in the middle of the flower didn't really show up so I decided to paint the grout in those areas. Well, I forgot to add a key ingredient, gel medium, and painted it bright PINK. Fortunately I was able to tone the pink down with some Pearlx but it was too late to submit to the orchid show.

Santa Barbara School of Mosaic Art Workshop

I spent last weekend at a workshop with well-known English mosaic artist Martin Cheek. The workshop was held at Tami Macala's Santa Barbara Institute of Mosaic Art. The class was more about Martin giving us insight into many aspects of mosaics, form, than it was about finishing a mosaic piece. Plus as I listened to his lectures, I realized that I had already made some design flaws in my piece. More on that later.

However, I did do a funky cat with Martin's fusions, smalti and vitreous glass. I also had some fusions from my friend Gary, so I added his butterfly and tail to the mix. And I had some ceramic pieces I threw in for even more fun. 

Martin Cheek

Martin is an extremely knowledgeable artist as well as being quite the funny man. He entertained us with many different kinds of humor. He also imparted very sound information about design, composition, colors, and contrast. So my beginning attempt is shown below and then the piece as it progressed through the weekend. I didn't finish as you can see but I plan to finish gluing and grouting soon. 

Martin grouts everything he does with a medium gray grout. He told us that he lost a sale because a woman asked him why his smalti piece wasn't grouted. He told her all the reasons behind not grouting smalti but she didn't buy it anyway. Martin also has a new book called Fused Glass Mosaics which I bought and am halfway through. It's a very enlightening book. 

And here is my cat. I'm still going to add the fusions coming in from the top that I had in the beginning picture. Another trick Martin taught us was the tone is extremely important in a piece and by converting a picture to grayscale, you can see if there is a good contrast of tone. Obviously I did a terrible job on the cat. The turquise background has the same tone as the green and orange of the cat. It's too late to change it now but it is a valuable lesson.

Grayscale

Ready to Grout

Stained Glass Bottle

Today I have a few items to grout. The first is a fancy-shaped bottle I found at a thrift store. The second is a small wooden lazy susan I found at a thrift store. The third is the stained glass piece I started at Tami Macala's Santa Barbara School of Mosaic Art workshop last year. I started it but had another piece I was working on and so I did that one instead. This has been sitting around, and I finally decided to start using up some of the many, many substrates I have ready to mosaic.

So today I'll grout them all. The weather is overcast right now so it's a good time to get outside and get busy. I'll post finished pictures later!

Lazy Susan

Add caption

Santa Barbara School of Mosaic Art Fiberglass Mesh Workshop

The Santa Barbara School of Mosaic Art in Santa Barbara, CA is having Mesh and Flower Mosaic Workshop on August 27-28. You will create three flowers (or anything else you like) on fiberglass mesh that can be taken home and installed permanently on a wall or other hard surface. These pictures were taken at the Institute of Mosaic Art in Oakland where they are remodeling their bathroom with mosaic art from staff, teachers and guest teachers.


These workshops are always a lot of fun. I am always amazed at the talent people have who are doing mosaics for the first time.You might also want to do birds, butterflies or dragonflies to attach to a wall on the outside of your house. The sky's the limit!!!