Happy New Year!!!

Happy New Year everyone! Celebrate what is just ending and what will be just beginning!

How to better end the year than with my most ambitious 2010 mosaic project? Not only that, but it also represents an end, a very symbolic way to celebrate the dawn of an era and anticipate the rising of a hopefully even better one – Mosaic Sunset Paintings.

I started by showing you the finished project because I am not sure how many of you are gonna exchange the party preparation tools for some mosaic ones and start mosaicquing away into the new year. Not even I am planning on doing that, although I can’t promise anything… 🙂

Just for the fun of it, the 4 paintings together are a bit over 1 meter long (including the 3 centimeter brake inbetween each painting) and vary in height between 33 and 23 centimeters. It took me 1 week to complete and was designed to fit cromatically and overall in an already established area – my parents’ livingroom.

And here goes…

I found inspiration on the internet, where else?

Then, as with all my projects, I started with a piece of paper. First I designed the painting on a larger scale, but, since I appreciated they’d be quite heavy and as usual smaller is prettier and more appreciated, I rescaled them. I also cut them to scale to make sure I like them.

Next step: finding the materials. Finding a carpenter proved to be an almost impossible task, but eventually found one that cut the plywood I had bought in a different store (long time waiting there too) in the desired pattern.

Before it all starts, one needs to prep the base: paint the back and apply glue on the front to create a seal between the wood and the soon to follow grout.

Next, cut the mosaic into the desired shapes and start gluing.

… and the sun (I used beads from a broken earing in the sun area to add color)…

… and the rays…

… and the first 2 paintings ungrouted…

The grouting process followed:

And, because I had other obligations, I stopped the process for a while, only to continue in about a week’s time with the other 2 paintings… The whole process again:

That has proved to be a mistake, because after I finished I noticed that I appreciated wrongly the sizes of the black mosaic of the water. This time I cut it too big and was out of place with the other 2 paintings. I couldn’t leave it like that so I undid and redid it.

And here is the final masterpiece… 🙂

Tagged: home, over 1 day, painting

Posted in: English