Portrait Mosaic

This mosaic's name hereafter will be Sheba. I think it looks enough like Sheba to be titled with her name... I have taken some liberties - the real Sheba's hair rarely gets this long before she does something interesting to it, and if it does get this long it is a mass of curls. The eyes are green enough, but they could have used an outer edge of brown that you simply cannot do in mosaic unless you're creating a larger piece of work or working with smaller slivers of glass - and the pieces for the iris are already less than 3/16th of an inch square. Sheba also has piercings and a beautiful tattoo on her neck.

But otherwise, this is recognizable as Sheba...

There's a bit of reflection in the lower part of the mosaic.  I took this photo before coming to work and I did not have time to set up the lights as I would have liked.

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Portrait Mosaic Progress - Decisions Made

Over the weekend while working on the mosaic I decided that I would have the hair on the portrait's right side (left as you're looking at the mosaic) go behind the shoulder and the hair on the other side come in front of the shoulder. The slant of the head, and the fact that I wanted to cover the ears with the hair made this an obvious choice once I got down to the shoulders. I started with making the hair on both sides fall behind the shoulders and ended up taking off some tesserae on the portrait's left side.

I think this will end up looking much better.

I am also trying to decide what color to make the clothing and the background. I'm thinking about using colors 442 and 446 or 545, 456 and 546d.


I'm not certain about the background yet. Maybe a mixture of the colors 321, 323, 325 and 325b...

In any case it will mean another order from smalti.com - where these images of smalti colors came from.

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Quick Progress Report on Portrait Mosaic

Spent the time I normally would have used to create this post before work discussing memorial arrangements for the wife of a friend. Very sad.

So this is just going to be a photo of last night's progress because I am at work and need to get busy with that:

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Portrait Mosaic Progress - XXVIII

Okay, a bit of an exaggeration. I've only been working on this mosaic since April 1st, but I did have hopes of getting farther along on it over the weekend than I actually did... but you know - laundry, dishes, and the odd artist's workshop tend to eat up studio time. And it REALLY was my turn to do some of the housework. Abelisto often ends up doing far more than I in the care of the house.

Other than the amount of progress I am feeling pretty good about this mosaic. I like the way it's turning out (hint for looking at close-up photos of mosaics - squint your eyes up to the point where the lines between the tesserae are less obvious...)

I've started working on the hair. Since the hair is supposed to be nearly black I am using really dark blues, a dark mahogany brown, some random dark grays for the main flow of the hair, with slightly lighter versions of those colors as highlights.

You can see some lines that I've drawn in the process of thinking about the hair. After several tries at creating the outline for the hair I still was not satisfied with it. So instead of following some predetermined line - in which case I would have set the outer edge of the hair and worked inward toward the face - I've decided that when I work on the part where the hair is hanging downward, I would start right alongside the face and work my way down the mosaic in "locks" of hair. When it looks and feels right I'll stop. You can see the beginning of this on the right side of the face (left side as you are looking at the photo).

I haven't decided if I am going to show the ears or not. If I do I'll have to pull off a couple of the hair tesserae that I added last night.

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