13 Tips for Creating Sea Glass Mosaic Art

hello everybody thanks for joining me today I'm Jackie and I create mosaics using sea glass and today I'm going to show you my sea glass mosaic family of fish so I'm here at the cottage and it's the first of the summer season and what I usually do when I get here at the first of the season is I'll start a mosaic sometimes more than one and then I'll work on them whenever I get an opportunity over the course of the summer and so it can take me a while to get a project done because when I'm here I tend to be at the beach quite a bit or socializing because we have quite a bit of family around here and I love to socialize with my family and the other thing is I have to go home quite a bit so I'm kind of back and forth so it can take me a while but what I'm going to do is I'm going to start this project today and then I'll show you my progress over the course of the summer so it might be a little while into the summer or towards the end of the summer before I actually post the video but eventually I'll get it done so what I'm going to do is I have this frame it's an old antique window and it's got four panes in it and I cleaned up this frame and I decide it once I cleaned it up I'm not going to paint it I'm gonna leave it the way it is it's rustic and rough and I really like the look of it and I'm thinking that I kind of pictured that a really neat underwater scene would look nice so what I've done is I've cut four four pieces of paper to fit in each pane and I've drawn a family of fish so there's only five fish in this but once I do my five fish I might add a few other small fish we'll see the first thing I did this one I went to start doing it and I realized that my let's take down one side down so tip number one on this piece has to be make sure your pattern is so it's on right and in this case I had to retake it so then what I'm going to do is I have a tray of brown sea glass here and it's mostly small to medium brown and I'm going to use those to filming the silhouettes of all these fish onto my glass and then I've got a bunch to pick from in fitting in the fish when I'm doing so about like this what I would typically do is start at the top and work my way down because I find the tips of the fish are probably the best place to start and in the tips here when you find some pieces that kind of fit in nicely with your tips you can fit them in I've done a fish piece in one of my previous video so you may have seen that one so this making of the fish bit might be a bit repetitive for you and if you find it's repetitive just skip through it but if you are interested in seeing how I create these fish you can continue to watch this section of this video so once I have the outline pieces of the fish planned out I'm gonna glue them on so I have my glue my kitchen and back adhesive caulking silicone and I have got a paper towel array and I've got a couple of skewers here a barbecue so you were in a toothpick to clean away any excess so that's all I need for materials so I'm going to glue along the outside of this fish here put a little bit of on each piece and glue it down before I start filling in the fish new barbecue skewers are great for poking at the pieces once you've got them glued on to just to make sure they're lined up just perfectly because the silicone takes a while to set and then you can puss around with the pieces for a bit and there we go I have the outline of the top part of that fish done now what's different from these fish from the last one that I did is that I have these breaks and the panes of glass so when you start on to the next pane of glass you want to make sure that your the pattern might not line up perfectly so make sure that your pieces of glass line up so that it looks like the fish is just behind the pane of glass now you might be watching me do this and you might be thinking on going fairly quickly but I would caution you to take your time I've been making sea glass mosaics for a really long time and what happens it's like anything the longer you do it the more practice you have the easier it gets and I find because I've been doing mosaics for a long time I am developing a bit of an app for looking at my sea glass and a good piece that's going to fit just right so when you're first starting out doing this you might need some practice in getting the pieces lined up so they fit together nicely so take your time after all the longer it takes you to do the more hours of relaxation you get I always say one of the best things about sea glass mosaics is the hours and hours of relaxation that comes with doing it and if you're searching through your sea glass you can see once I get the airplane or the fish done up here I don't want to fill in the middle until I can either decide a bit because I don't want to mess up the air one I'm happy with the way that fish looks now but down here in the thin part I find it easiest to do the outside of the fin like the two outside lines and then fill it in and as you can see I'm finding a piece of fits and then gluing it right away as opposed to the outline where I kind of got the outline there and then went back and glued it all these wooden skewers are great for cleaning grew rocket glass - you can use the pokey part for poking at things and bottom part is flatter and so I've let this set for a bit and so now these pieces around the outline of the fish aren't going to move on me so now I can just go about filling in the inside of the fish and I'm basically just putting the pieces together like a puzzle I'm seeing a blank space and then trying to find pieces of sea glass that fit I've got quite a few to pick from here and if I can't find what I'm looking for I'll just dump some more onto the glass here and I'll just fill it in this is a fairly straightforward process I can be slowed by times but that's okay so these fish aren't really a particular shape or anything or a particular fish I just really kind of like the shape of fish and for me because it's a silhouette it's just like the shadow of the fish swimming through the water so I don't know if it shows up it very well on the video but I'm making an effort here to use all different shades of brown because if I just used all the same shade of brown I think my fish would look fairly flat there you go I have the first fish finished that's quite a tongue twister their first fish finished and I'm just gonna go ahead and fill in the other four fish in much the same approach so I finished my five fish and I'm just going to give you a close-up on each fish in case you want to see how I assembled the pieces to make the silhouette of each fish each fish no matter what you do is going to be unique and individual because as things go with seaglass each piece is unique and individual so there's a infinite array of ways you can put pieces together to create a silhouette so there you have my five fish now to create the underwater scene that they're swimming in so one of the things that I like to do when I'm working on a mosaic at the cottage is to collect pieces at the beach that I'm going to use in the mosaic I'm currently working on so yesterday when I was at the beach I found quite a few things I want to use like this piece of driftwood I don't know if you can tell but it's all stained with red mud and I kind of like that and it fits perfect right there so I'm going to put that there and then I want to put the Inukshuk standing on the piece of driftwood even though you know driftwood wouldn't be at the bottom of the ocean but this is a fanciful piece after all and I collected a bunch of black stones to make my next shot and I decided to gather some rocks to put at the bottom just to kind of ground the bottom of the piece I love these sparkly rocks that we get here rocks and pebbles if I get a few of those ones that are really unique the other thing that I have going on in this piece I have a crack right here and I've reinforced the back of the crack with a little bead of silicone but the front of the crack I want to make sure that I cover it fairly well with rocks and sea glass so I'm gonna put some rocks along there and I found a few pieces of this petrified wood some small pieces so I'm gonna put those in it's kind of nice having some big chunky things sometimes I don't even attach them to the glass I attach them to the bottom of the window frame this is kind of a unique one it might stand up really nicely at the bottom of the window frame the other thing I found was this white big chunky piece of sea glass that I thought kind of looked like a jellyfish so I thought I might put that in there and create a bit of a jellyfish and I might look through some of my whites to see if I have a couple of other that are kind of roundish and similar like that and I found this little clam shell that was still hinged it's really tiny so I thought I might reinforce the hinge with some silicone and put it down here at the bottom and maybe put a treasure inside like this tiny little blue piece that I found maybe I'll glue that so it's sticking out of the clam shell so I'll set that there for now till I decide and I found some cool tiny little shells and the other thing I like to do in an underwater scene is have waves of stuff coming up so I have these shelves that are not so interesting on the outside they are kind of pretty but the inside of them it's got all this purple stuff so that one's broken I don't want to use that one I thought I might put a bunch of these in make a few lines of these coming up to kind of simulate kelp or seaweed growing up from the bottom of the ocean and the other thing I really like are these I've collected a whole bunch of these yesterday and the day before and there are the shelves that are kind of turned out like circles and I find those are really cool in an underwater scene because they're kind like bubbles coming up from the bottom so I'm also going to put green stripes flowing mine's coming up of green pieces of sea glass that are going to be like kelp and seaweed growing up from the bottom of the ocean so here I am at the end of the summer and I don't have my family of fish finished probably because we had too much good weather this summer and I spent a lot of time down at the beach seaglass hunting and didn't have enough rainy days to sit and work on my sea glass art so I'm taking it home and I'll finish it at home and I hope you found this video really interesting seeing how I was putting this piece together and I will follow it up with the second video showing you the completion of the project after I get it done when I get home so thanks very much for joining me and until next time happy sea glass hunting [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sea Glass Art by Jackie

Views: 3,299

Rating: 4.9148936 out of 5

Keywords: jackie trimper, sea glass, sea glass art, beach glass, beach glass art, beachcombing, glass on glass art, sea glass wall art, nova scotia sea glass artist, prince edward island sea glass, mosaic art, sea glass mosaic art, sea glass crafts, sea glass mosaic wall art, glass mosaic, sea glass hunting, sea glass art by jackie, how to, DIY sea glass

Id: vYExsmi4TQg

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2019