Mosaic Rocks!

Light & Mood - part 2

This past week with the holiday in the middle threw me off schedule to update the blog. I did find a few hours to work on my Turner-esque piece with some interesting results.

My goal is to create a mosaic with marble in which colors blend with each other to create an impressionistic mood similar to what Turner did with oils and watercolors in his work. The subject is a silhouette San Giorgio Maggiore against the Venetian lagoon and sky. Here's the piece without the sky.

I wanted the water to be colorless. You know, that color on a foggy day or at a particular time of day in which water really has no discernable color - not gray, not white, definitely not blue. So I mixed some grays with white cararra marble - which is also not quite white and not quite gray.

San Giorgio and its surrounding buildings is made with a gray-green marble, separate enough to distinguish it from the water of the lagoon, but similar in tones to make it look ghostly. It's hard to tell where the water ends and the land begins. The tops of the bell tower and the dome progressively get lighter so that they will blend in with the sky.

I started on the sky yesterday using a mixture of light yellow and rose colored marble. The rose stones are close to the horizon representing a setting (or rising) sun. The rest of the sky will be yellow. Here's the result so far.

A side note about photography: Both of the previous pictures were taken at different times of the day. For the first, I placed the mosaic on a black background; the second was placed on a tan background. I cropped out the backgrounds in both. It's interesting to see the difference in the colors. The first has a lot of blue tones in the photograph. The second is more white & gray, closer to how the piece actually looks. Perhaps it's the time of day, perhaps it's the background on which the photo was taken, or perhaps the color changed in the photograph when the yellow was added.

I like the ghostly effect. The piece is really interesting to look at from a distance. Close up is another story. Here's how I am placing the pieces:

Nothing flat here. Each piece is a different height, randomly set. This creates an interesting texture for the piece, but it also increases the exposed surface area of the marble. Not only are you seeing in the tops of the stones, you're also seeing the sides. This creates more color - and more shadow which perhaps confuses our eyes, making them see a blur of color instead of individual stones.