Work in progress

I've been working in the studio quite a bit these past days. Not all of the work has been creating art - some of it has been making the space work better for me.

I finished a mosaic ATC (artist trading card) Sunday night. Tonight I finished the mosaic for Jason (my dreadlock artist) except for the grouting.

Here are some images of Jason's mosaic which I will be grouting tomorrow night:

 A photo from Saturday, or maybe Sunday - I'm trying to determine the best size to make the final piece... I wasn't sure when I started how big I wanted to make it, so I did not trim the wedi board until I had enough of the mosaic done to make that decision. The black, square tiles are not glued down here. They are just placed to make it easy to see how it would look at a given size.

How it looked at 9pm tonight.

 From this angle you can see the face, the imagining stars, the letters/words, and my signature.

 I wanted to be able to add the eye and mouth details to the face but I wanted the face to be made up of as few pieces of glass as possible so as to fit with how I did the hair/dreads. However when I tried to cut the face glass so as to have the mouth and the eye be part of a traditional grout line I got a Heath Ledger Joker effect that I thought did not fit the piece (it actually was sort of creepy). So I tossed the first pieces and cut new ones. I put my Dremel in the mini-drill press, and using the glass drill bit, I cut into the face glass to make free-form grout lines in the glass. I am really happy with this so far... we'll see how it looks after it's grouted...

 Before we can be free we must first imagine ourselves free... don't know if that's quoting someone or not. I hear/read so much that I lose track of what I've come up with and what I've simply absorbed along the way...

Something I definitely absorbed - Finally a way to sign my work... following a method that I saw Matteo Randi doing at the Chicago Mosaic School earlier this month... using narrow copper strips, bent into letters and numbers. I wanted to sign and date the pieces in a way that shows when someone is looking at the work (as opposed to signing the back of the piece). I like the way this is working in this mosaic and I'm looking forward to using this method with future mosaics.