Mosaic workout challenge, week 13: Animate

I’m baaa-aaaack! Wow, after doing these challenges for 11 weeks straight, it certainly felt weird to skip a week, but I think I have a good excuse: I was in Chicago taking Verdiano Marzi’s class (I kept joking that I was going to tell Sophia that Verdiano Marzi ate my homework). This week’s challenge—“Animate“—was from a guest artist, Delaine Hackney, and was an exploration of how to use colour, materials, and flow to give a sense of animation.

tendril - full 2

Title: “Tendril”

Size: 5″ x 6″

Materials: Smalti and, uhh, a lot of thinset

How long did it take to complete? About three hours

Thoughts: I made some strategic decisions this week because I was short on time and energy, and yet still wound up needing 3 hours even with all that negative space. Sigh. It took me quite a while to land on how I was going to tackle this challenge. When I started thinking about movement and life and energy, for some reason I was drawn to the idea of working with a simple line that increasingly gets more and more animated / lively. I wish I had had a longer substrate, as that would’ve given me more room to progress from calm to crazy (the transition seems a bit abrupt to me in this piece, especially when compared to the vision I had in my head). I also took the opportunity to push myself to cut smaller pieces, which I struggle with, especially when using smalti (verdict: still struggling) and to work in a thicker bed of thinset (verdict: still feels weird and needs work). Anyway, I kind of like how the finished product is also kind of reminiscent of roots or veins or lungs – adds a whole other layer to “animate”.

A parting close-up shot of "Tendril"
A parting close-up shot of “Tendril”

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