Ship Mosaic

Here is the mosaic as of this past weekend (didn't do any work on it tonight - still getting over the effects of a sleepless night last night and a migraine this morning).

The water is done. I'm starting the sky this week and hopefully I'll get up to Saint Paul to get more glass for the rest of the map area soon. I could order it online, but it's always so hard to tell what you'll actually get...

I took off one row of tessarae on the right side of the ocean. It did not look very good. You can compare this image with the previous post and see what I mean. There's one part of the front-most sail that I might rework too. So far I feel like I am getting the feeling of movement that I was looking for with the cuts and placement of the tessarae: the water looks like it is flowing around, back and forth as waves, except for the wake the ship is cutting; the sails look like they are stretched tight with the kind of wind that would be necessary to create the wake that I have here; and the land looks rather sedentary (ha!).

Still trying to come up with an idea for the skull & crossbones...

This time I  managed to get the colors pretty close when I optimized the image so you can see how it looks for real (although that depends on you monitor settings in the end...).

I'm still leaning towards a light blue-gray for the center section and a taupe-gray for the sides. Don't know for certain yet. I'll have to see how the sky works out.

Ship Mosaic Progress

Here's the ship mosaic as of tonight. At this point I have around 55 hours in it - probably another 40 or so to go.

I'm getting anxious to finish it. At this point I'm thinking a light blue-gray grout, maybe...

Both these images are a bit grainy since I was using the little camera and shooting in a low-light situation and for mosaics you absolutely cannot use a flash and get anything worthwhile... I'll take better photos with the digital SLR later. I left that camera at work and I did not want to wait until tomorrow to get the photos online (it's been too long since I last posted about the ship mosaic). I want to get some diffusers and spot lights and create a place in the studio for taking high quality photos of the mosaics. I priced some kits, but the cheapest was $100 and I know I can make them cheaper than that. I'd rather make them and spend the savings on glass.

This image shows most of the mosaic - although you cannot see a lot of it since it's covered with loose glass tiles and strips of glass.

This image shows a closer view of the sea - without so much glare on the glass.

I need to get more of the butterscotch-colored glass for the right side of the mosaic. What I bought earlier is a bit too light. I have plenty of the pale blue streaked glass for the sky.

The left-over glass will go with me to the intermediate class I am teaching in October & November. The beginning class will be working with the 3/4" vitreous glass tiles since they are a bit cheaper and easier to work with for beginners.

The Mead At Work

This batch has been fermenting since Labor day. I used honey from Abelisto's hives.

In a couple weeks I'll rack it off into the secondary fermentation bucket and add 10 cups of persimmon pulp.

All of this won't fit into the 5 gallon bucket I use for the persimmon mead - there will be a couple gallons of leftover that I'll add blackberries to.  I'll bottle the Blackberry as a sparkling mead.

Ten Lessons the Arts Teach

From The Arts and the Creation of Mind, by Elliot Eisner

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
   
   
2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
   
   
3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
   
   
4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
   
   
5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
   
   
6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
   
   
7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
   
   
8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
   
   
9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
   
   
10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.