Luke - week 2

I found some time this week to work on Luke. His face is beginning to emerge slowly. I've discovered from the few portraits that I've done in the past that the mouth is the hardest part to get right. It amazes me how much expression is conveyed through the structure of the mouth. Luke is a bit different. Fortunately (for me) his mouth is pretty much hidden behind his facial hair. So it should be a bit easier to do.

It's interesting to play around with digital photos. Often they reveal things about a mosaic which aren't apparent to my eye when working on a piece. Photos have a tendency to accentuate individual pieces of tesserae where the eyes want to blur the pieces together.

I'm working from an enlarged photo of the original but in this case I shrunk both the original and the photo of my mosaic. There are a few surprises.

My pallette of available colors is different from the original - that's no surprise. My piece is significantly whiter and redder.

I've tried to follow the lines of andamento closely and keep the values of the adjoining pieces as close as possible to the original. However, you can clearly see in the reduced photo that the shadowing under his right eye (the one on your left) is off. My piece has a distinct line; the original has a more consistent shadow.

Another difference - in the original the upper part of his right nostril blends into the face whereas in mine it is a bit more distinct.

Also - notice how his right eye (the one on your left) conveys an entirely different expression between the two pieces. The original is more round. His eyes look like they're slightly bulging as if he's surprised or is curious about what he's looking at. My eye is less round. This makes him look like he's inspecting or peering at something (or someone), perhaps with a bit of disapproval as only saints (and mothers) can do.

One of the most valuable lessons in mosaic making that I got was during the Orsoni class - and it didn't come from the Orsoni group (sorry guys) but from Sophie. (We met while taking the Orsoni class in November 2005.) It was late at night. We already had way to much wine. I was exhausted, but Sophie was as tenacious as only Sophie can be. She pointed to a few individual pieces of tesserae in my piece and told me to change them. Just a few pieces. I resisted at first, because I didn't want to chisel out these pieces which were already stuck in place by hardened thinset. But eventually I gave in - more to get her off my back than to improve the mosaic. What a difference!!!! Those two or three pieces completely changed the piece and made it work.

So my mission for today is to change a couple of pieces in Luke to see what difference they make in brining my piece closer to the original. I think I'm going to keep the disapproving eye, however.