Live Workshop - Tami Macala - Mosaic Art for Beginners

life hi everyone this is aaron roy from teachable thank you for joining us today we have a very fun workshop starting in a few moments with tammy makala uh before we get started if anyone's this is oh i already see folks in the comments which is the best uh but before we get started today uh and i hand this over to tammy i just want to make sure everything works technically that way we have a really wonderful workshop what i would love in the comments is i see folks already saying where you're joining us from it would be great to let us know can you hear us um you know can you see us do things look and sound okay uh actually it'd be great to hear you know is this your first time or you know have you seen tammy before just let us know in the comments and tammy if you don't mind say a few words before we really get started here thank you again for having me here at this wonderful platform i'm excited to share my passion and working with new beginner mosaic artists is my favorite so i love introducing this type of art to people so if you are new and you've never ever experienced mosaic art then this will be fun nice and i've actually had the pleasure of watching one of your workshops in the past uh and this will be fun for me too i mean watching these it's like downright therapeutic and i could kind of watch you do this for hours i like fall into the zone um i see folks can see us they can hear us it's awesome um just so you know tammy where some of these folks are joining from i see cherry hill new jersey i see tennessee i see the uk um thank you for joining us this evening wow yeah canaveral australia again another evening one henderson nevada springfield missouri louisville uh ottawa texas south carolina south south care for southern california um we got folks joining from all over the place today um before i hand this over to you just a few technical housekeeping things for anyone who may be joining us late um this is this there will be a replay available for this workshop so if at any point you need to hit pause if you want to go back 30 seconds because you know perhaps you want to hear something that tammy says feel free to do that also if you're joining us late and you're watching this on fast forward to catch up don't worry we'll send out a replay after um and you can catch up with it then uh also any links that you know tammy mentions today we'll we'll try to include at the end in any email we send after the workshop and also try to drop it in chat uh with that tammy i want to kick the floor to you you know some of these folks probably know you but some of them don't so you'd be wonderful to start with some background and i know today you're going to be going through at least a portion of the history of mosaic art so if you want whenever you're ready you can share your presentation and i'll pop backstage okay thank you again aaron for having me here and being able to represent mosaic arts online and yeah we're going to go over a little bit quick really quick history and just a few um eye candy pictures of mosaic art and where it all comes from as an ancient art and then i'll give you a little background about me and how i got started as a mosaic artist because i think it's important to know that it is not some crazy business plan sort of adventure it's actually just kind of from the hip and it's worked out well over the last 20 years and then i'm going to do the fastest two-day workshop in 45 minutes possible and uh just the cliff notes version but some demonstrating of tools and materials and things just for getting started if you're new to mosaic art just give you really an intro and demonstrate how to make something as i will do quickly in our fun hour together here so yes real quick i'm gonna just um drop into a shared screen mode hopefully and see if i can pull this off i'm on standby to help okay i think i got it here we go all right so the history of mosaic art today really quickly so as if you don't know mosaic art goes back to the mesopotamian era and it was a way that they could tell stories with seashells and stones and different things and then as we moved into the roman empire they were able to do more in greece and rome and most of europe obviously and so these are just some of the pieces again i don't want to go into real detail because i want to go have fun making some work but i just wanted to say the art that i create goes way back and some of these patterns you see here are so old and this is actually um some of the stuff that is at the getty or was it the getty museum in malibu at the villa but these patterns are still inspiring people today to create contemporary mosaic art so these are just two of the very old ones and then here is st mark's basilica in venice italy which i had the privilege of going to visit and this is on the outside so you can see how beautiful now the glass and the gold that they used as well to create more stories of the biblical biblical times and architecturally these are obviously withstanding time even though they do get restored this is so uh beautiful to see and this is the outside and then this is a more detail on the outside so you can see a little bit more closely but that is so much gold and just i love how they were able to do the shading on the clothing and there's expression and this is so you know this is between the 6th and 15th century so this is so long ago this is inside the st marks in venice i went and studied at the orsoni school in venice italy so got to see some of the stuff so just a little more detail shot and that is literally it so here's where i go back and get out of this and i share my screen somehow here we are i'm gonna stop sharing and now it's just me so that's just a really quick eye candy and um basically i did not know much about mosaic art when i got started and i was a costumer for movies and television for over 20 years and when i was 23 years old i started on a tv show called dr quinn medicine woman with jane seymour and while i was working on the show um one of my co-workers said to me one day would you like to come over this weekend and make mosaics he was really crafty and loved to make um all kinds of stuff and i was like what's mosaics and he said well come over and i'll show you this weekend so i went over there and we just broke a bunch of tile and we glued it on to flower pots and picture frames and made some really to my you know sadness bad mosaics but it was the first time that i'd ever done it and i was hooked from there so i never stopped creating since 1996 and um i would go on to do more mosaicing while i was a costumer so i would come on to my shows i'd be working at my trailer and then i would actually bring small things like votives and anything i could to create and keep me sane working 80 hour weeks and still enjoying creating mosaic art and then in 2000 people started asking me well could you make me a mirror could you do this for me and i'm like well that sounds kind of like a commission and of course i'd love to do that so again it was from the hip it was really just experimenting and learning as much as i could from books that's all we had back then were books we had no videos we had no kind of facebook groups we had no way to learn except experimentation and books and that's basically how i taught myself so i am a self-taught mosaic artist i have obviously taken many workshops but in the beginning i was just self-taught and the first workshop i did take was in 2004 from an artist named laurel true and when i went and took that workshop it was architectural applications and the important part about that workshop is that it really validated everything i already knew i did learn some things but i was already creating i had already set up my company which was called create arts online oh no which was called all cracked up mosaics so i started all cracked up mosaics and by going to take that workshop it really validated i was using a lot of the right materials that are so important for architectural especially and um it's um it was really great i was doing fireplaces i was doing backsplashes showers lots of benches i also did a lot of art fairs i had to find ways to expose myself and get my business out there so doing the weekend art fairs in different cities i lived in los angeles at the time and so it was really just about getting out there and people finding me and wanting to buy my art and it just grew i've never advertised my art it's always been through either word of mouth the art fairs i did approach a lot of interior decorators and tile stores back then so learning how to do the business side was really important as well because again we didn't have real advertising um like you might see on social media now so it was important as i was learning though that i was doing it with integrity and that's the part i teach my beginners the most important part because a lot of people are going to spend their time and their money creating and they want it to last and it's really important that it goes on the right materials to last and so i feel very fortunate that starting out early and people taking a chance on me and trusting me that i was using the right adhesives like thinset which we'll go over today and the right substrates and back then it was hardy backer and things that really were going to stand the test of time and installing them correctly was really really important and to this day i have never been approached by any client to say that something has fallen apart and so i feel very grateful that as time has gone on that i was able to do these installations and that everyone is happy in 2009 i decided i could teach i didn't know what that meant so i went and taught for free one weekend materials only fee at a community center and i enjoyed it i enjoyed obviously i got a little extrovert in me so i enjoyed the people i got energy from it and i loved sharing more and more about mosaic art that people could learn and we did the basics it was broken tiles broken china things like that flower pots and stepping stones and things that were really good for just a beginner and after that it was obvious that i could do this and so i opened the santa barbara school of mosaic art in my backyard and it's still going now it's a little slower right now with covid but that's okay because then as i was teaching it became obvious that maybe we could reach more people that you know it's nice when i can get 12 students in a studio or i can bring in teachers from all over the world to teach at the santa barbara school of mosaic art which maybe some of you have been to or taken a workshop at but now it was time to like reach a wider audience and so 2016 we launched mosaic arts online which is why i'm happy to be here today with teachable and that was just a really um eye-opening thing i knew about film and so i have this background of how to work with some lighting some cameras but it was really more about relationships with the talent which would then become our teachers here so we have over 25 teachers over 90 courses and then in 2019 my husband was able to leave his job and now he works full-time with me and without him we wouldn't have quite the tech advances that we've had in being able to really produce some very high quality courses so that's enough talking about me and the background of how from 1996 we got to today but what i'm really excited about is i'm going to switch my camera now and you guys are going to get an overhands perspective which is how we shoot all of our courses at mosaic arts online and see just a little bit about the materials and things that i'm really comfortable with that i've used over the years and it's really just the basics it's so that you could walk out you know into your probably garage and your thrift shop and a few other things and you could be creating tomorrow and um so i'm going to switch my camera and then we will look at the stuff we have set up there all right so you can see here i have um got my my easy frame so what we're going to do here is this is a lot of information in this screen so what i want to do is i'm going to go over some things but basically when you're creating mosaic art the two the three most important things you need to think about is your materials your tools and what you're going to create on and then the other important thing you are going to need is your adhesive and we're going to go over a really quick um demonstration of everything while i create in this frame so what i'm going to do is i know this is a lot going on here but i'm going to back out a few things here unpack a few things and then we're going to go over the tools for how you use ceramic tile the tools how you cut stained glass which was probably the most used material for most of my large scale mosaics and commissions i'll introduce you to a few other things that i won't be using today but just to give you some eye opening and then my favorite material that i like to work with are found objects and so this is from out in the desert and it's really weathered and old as you can see this is so i put a lot of found objects like this into my work a really old jar cover and so lid and so we're going to i'm going to create a little something on this substrate and we're going to go over what this substrate is because it's a big exciting product that many people might not know about that's super easy to use so we're going to work on something that i will create but while i introduce you to a lot of these tools and materials so sorry quick sip of water okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to remove the stained glass and the china for right now and what i'm going to show you is a demonstration on how to break ceramic tile ceramic tile can come in low or high fire this is low fire this is just a pretty orange color and this is how i got started i used to break it with a towel and then you always want to turn it over so you break it on the um not glazed side but when i took that workshop in 2004 i learned about the heavy suede glove so using a heavy suede glove in my non-dominant hand i will take a tile like so and these are called tack hammers and they're really easy to use it's you could hammer that's fine too and the other tool you're going to need are what we call side biter nippers and these you can just find at your big box hardware stores so using my glove to protect my hand there's a little gap right there so it's not touching it you're just gonna smash the tile in the center and you're gonna get usually four sometimes five pieces right so then what i will do is i will cut i will break it again so smashing it again and this is not hurting my hand but i just get it down to a size that i think is manageable so these three pieces are pretty manageable but it depends on the size of the piece you're working on so since we're going to be working on this little six by six frame you don't want to have big maybe you do but if you have big gargantuan pieces you're really not going to be able to um fit much interesting stuff in here so once i've broken that tile down i then come in with my side biter nippers because i want to be able to shape the tile the way i need it for my mosaic the trick with using side biter nippers is you want to make sure that your nipper only goes an eighth of an inch onto the tile if you push it all the way on it actually doesn't stress the tile as much so you're going to go eighth of an inch right there i put my fingers on either side and using my hand at the bottom of the tool i have a really strong right hand these days and boom you have now shaped the tile the way you want it so you can do it again and there you go so that is ceramic tile now what i have done here is i have brought i'm going to bring in this little piece here and show you that i have actually cut a few pieces already and these are going to be used to do my demonstration of how to create in a little bit but i just so you can see that i have more of these orange pieces here but before we get into how to create i want to do a demonstration of the stained glass which is right here so here is a beautiful piece of blue stained glass there's a little one here and then this is the larger one this is called a brand that used to be called spectrum now it's called oceanside it is the smoothest and easiest um glass to cut because it's just doesn't have any texture to it cuts really easily it comes in beautiful colors a lot of it's wispy like this and like i said i've used a lot of this for my creations in um my large-scale uh installations so i'm gonna push this little guy aside and i'm gonna bring in now the tools that it takes to create a stained glass mosaic and that's these three so here we have the um the glass score or cutter and that's this one these are called running pliers and then this is called a mosaic wheel nipper and this is one of you know the most prized possession of most mosaic artists this brand is called lepinet and like aaron said i'll put these um links onto the end of this um presentation so what i want to show you just is a really quick demonstration of how this tool these three tools work so using a glass score they have oil inside them there's a special oil that's in there and you always want to make sure there's a little oil on the wheel which you can see it's kind of coming off on my thumb a little bit and that just makes the wheel move down the glass a little easier so you're going to make sure that your hand is perpendicular not leaning down not too far up perpendicular to your glass and you're just going to push down and make sure you hear the score sound and that is what you want to hear and you want to see that little white line right there these are called running pliers and running pliers are what's going to split the glass so stained glass is like liquid in a solid form and what i've done is i have disrupted that solid form now and using running pliers you always want to make sure you have a black line on the top and not on the bottom because this tool has a little bump right here and it's going to split the glass exactly where i've asked it to with this score this screw can make my spring go more tension or less but you want to just make sure these are always touching when it's time and so what you want to do is you want to make sure you line up your black line with your score line some people hold their glass at the end you can or you can just hold not hold it it won't make a difference one of the things about when you do break stained glass is that as you're making strips it's good to start in the center of your teeth so i'll do another one here and then go again so like i said if you're going to get into um mosaic art then you want to probably try getting this type of glass first just so you're not feeling defeated by other glass that may be more challenging to cut the way you're asking it to so these are just we're just making some really simple strips now i'll show you how you can make a little bit of a curve let's say you want to make some leaves or some wave patterns so you want to make sure that your this line is always going in the direction of the way the score is going and then your glass will split apart easily so that is using those two tools but now here i want to make some squares and you can always make squares with just going across with the scoring or you can bring in your wheeled nippers and these wheeled nippers you want to always make sure that your glass is straight in the center and it's in the center of the wheels you don't want to be too low or too high and you don't want it to be wonky like that you want it to be straight and you want to hold these again at the bottom of the tool and you're just going to make sure when you do it you snap down and you'll get a straight cut if you're new to mosaic art and or maybe you've tried a few times and you're like oh every time i cut i get a curve or it's not straight it's because you're stressing the glass at the end of your strip put your your nippers in the center and work back from there and you'll see you'll always get a straight cut so a lot of people come to us and say how come i always get curves and sometimes you want a curve but sometimes you don't so that is how you cut stained glass so let's move on to the material that i used the most when i was first starting out as a mosaic artist because this is the most accessible you can go to your thrift shop you can go to your consignment store you can go on ebay you can go into your cabinets and find your broken china and china that you want to break china that has really cool patterns on it that's what you want to um work with so this is something that's from like the 1960s i think it just doesn't have any i love it when it has the prints on the bottom neither of these have any kind of writing on the bottom so this one does i always saved these and i made entire mosaics of just the bottoms of teacups and saucer and things like that so with the um china depending on its thickness you will use different nippers so these nippers they don't close all the way but you can you can either take the spring out which some people do but you can also grind these nubs down that are in between here like do you see those black nubs where my fingers are you grind those down and this these wheels will touch so depending how thin your product is then you can get your wheels to completely touch these go a lot farther apart but that's okay because they're really good at cutting a thicker material so let me demonstrate we'll get to they're called montelits i know i'm giving you guys a lot of information but that's what the replay is for you can watch it again um but i'm going to show you really quickly how to just cut this dish and let's say i just kind of want to get a little bit of the flour i don't always like to get like the perfect parts you kind of want to artistically have certain parts of them so you see the flower and now and this stuff is so easy to cut and now you've got just like an interesting piece that can go into a mosaic and it's got history to it and all that so we'll leave that there when we get to that part of the demonstration a lot of people ask how to cut like half a cup and if you don't own a tile saw which is the way or a ring saw either one of those that you can just cut straight across here and you end up with your little mug here which is part of the inspiration of the beginner course piece is this piece that does have a half a mug on um it's uh on its you know it's flat side so you can see down into there so if you don't have that and you have a few um cups to uh practice with there are times and i can't promise it's going to happen every time but you can usually get them to cut close and then you can either sort of trim this off a little bit to stay see if i'm getting this yeah but we want to get some of the foot off too there we go so now with a little bit of adhesive i have a half a mug that could sit as a cool focal point into my piece so that's one way that you can cut these mugs but then sometimes people just like to use the handles in their mosaics and i we have lots of artists at mosaic arts online that use different tessera as we like to call our materials in mosaic and this is either used like this or you can take this off or some people like to use the foot i mean there's so many different shapes that can come out of this um this one little teacup that has a bullfighter on it and that's a whole other thing you've got the pattern there that you could use for something else so in demonstrating how to cut with these i brought in a thicker what's this from 1981 so it's not that old but it's probably been in some diner somewhere for a while but what i'm going to show you is that the same exact nipper same exact handle holding these are longer these are called lepanets like i said they're more burly they're just can cut thicker stuff won't hurt your hands and that is going to be easier to use these for this thickness than it would be for me to use these now with this said you don't want to use either of these on your ceramic tile because these wheels will just be completely worn down and when you watch the course if you do the beginner course you'll learn a lot more about how these um tools can be used and how to adjust the wheels and different things like that but i want to just introduce you to a couple more materials and then i'm going to start demonstrating how to create on our small little substrate here so this is another material you can go out in your backyard and find and this is just sandstone these are just rocks you can create with that and like i said we have a couple courses at mosaic arts online with a great teacher that does that and this is mexican small tea so this is probably one of my favorite tessera to work with and it comes from a small town in mexico called kornavaca it has been made by the same family for five generations the predomo family and they take the glass in its molten state and they pour it over a flat surface and it's called a tortilla and so then once it is flat you can buy the tortillas as whole and cut them like you would like or you can buy them chopped and this is a mixed color called scarlet you can buy them as just one color on the website at smalty.com which will be another part of what we'll send you for the links or you can buy a mix so that's just something you can research on their website but this is my favorite material and if you see on my website all cracked upmosaics.com you'll see some pieces that i have created with this material so if the client is open to me using it i will rush to use this one before anything else it just makes me so happy this is gold so if you're not familiar with mosaic art gold has always been used over the hundreds and hundreds of years to create mosaic art so when i studied in italy at orsoni they were making the gold they take two weeks out for the furnaces to only create the glass that these gold leaf little tiny thin gold leaf goes on top of so they fuse the glass in these beautiful colors you can see the turquoise there's clear and then and here's white gold and they take the once the glass is fused they take the leaf and they put it over it and then it's fused again so this will never ever come off it can chip if i try and cut it funny but this is it's very expensive so i don't you know recommend it as a beginner but if uh you really do start getting into mosaic art i always put gold is in most of my pieces just little flecks of it it's in the mermaid it's in the dolphin and i really love this gold and i brought this back from orsoni a few years ago so what i'd like to do now is somehow clear the base here because that's the other thing about mosaic art it's very messy and i'm going to bring in our little ez frame and for those of you that are unaware or unfamiliar with easy frame this will definitely be on but this is a pre-made frame that comes with this it's an aluminum frame that i can sort of turn over and you can see it comes with this hanging hardware that you install with this substrate so that's what it comes with the hanging hardware at this substrate and this aluminum frame and then they give you the directions how to um do the hanging hardware it's very simple what's great about these frames is a you have instant art to hang and people ask all the time how do i frame my mosaics how do i frame my mosaics well if you get these frames and they come in many sizes then you are good to go they send it with this um substrate that's called go board you just got to be careful with billboard because it has some fiberglass sort of texture to it that can give you a little rash so i just recommend being really careful when you use it um and then they come with these the flat almost flush um uh these aren't the screws these are like kind of like the nuts that they're but the washer is on the side and so when we go to make our mosaic we can um we can cover them up and so this i'm going to go over is a really simple demonstration in creating with a couple different adhesives because i think adhesive is a really big question that people ask about with mosaic art and i have a couple that i'm a big fan of and one of them is this and this is dap quick seal and this is actually a kitchen and bathroom caulking believe it or not but it is waterproof it comes in white it comes in a few colors because they want to match caulk in some things and it also comes in clear you really don't need this mold guard version i just happened to find it with the clear so i bought it so this one if you find this in the store this is great what i love about it is it's very viscous so you'll see when i squirt it out it has a real thickness to it and i just love creating with it and um we're also going to show you i'm going to show you a little bit about thinset as well those are my two favorite adhesives to use so to get started i think what i will do is now that you've seen the demonstration of how to cut stained glass i have pre-cut these little four um pieces here and i'm sort of doing a very quick demonstration of what's in the beginner online course so if you decide to go forward with the online course that we're offering at the end of this presentation this is the piece that you see made throughout the whole course so it's a much longer version of what we're going to go over today but i just thought i would do some kind of mini version of it so what i'm going to do is i'm going to pull these four off and with mosaic art you um you know sometimes want to pre-cut stuff especially when you have the short time we have i'm going to use white for this because it's got this um you're putting it behind stained glass and even though this stained glass is totally opaque it's about the reflectivity that can still be behind it so if it were clear and sometimes my substrates aren't this light so it doesn't matter as much if it were clear or white today but when my substrates are dark or black you want to have that white background behind it so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to spread a little bit along there and this i can i don't need to really use anything i'm just going to jiggy it and there is enough of the adhesive there to set it and i'm giving a tiny gap here so that i can get some grout down in there which we will not be grouting this piece today so i guess this goes this way yeah so then i'll quickly do this one we'll get that down and then this one goes here [Music] so some um terminology and mosaic art is like if you've never heard the word tessera that is what we call our materials and that means a piece or a stone of some kind in italian and then there's other words like ondamento which we're not going to get into today but you can learn a lot about that in our other courses here at mosaic arts online but if you are familiar with mosaic we have lots of terminology in italian so next up again like i had done for the big piece i showed you i have a focal point that i want to add and this is like the super interesting if you can see it um old piece of glass that's just been weathered and beat up that i found somewhere out in the desert and what i'm going to do now is i'm going to bring in some thinset and this is thinset or mortar and i don't have time today to mix it for you but i wanted to show you the consistency of it and lots of mosaic artists use different food references for what consistency you want so this is hummus peanut butter i think i've heard brownie batter but that's what you want you don't want it to um fall off your applicator whether it's a stick or a italian spatula or whatever we're going to do so now that i've demonstrated the dap which i'm just demonstrating both there is no i could have done all thinset or all dap but i really just wanted to give you guys as much of an eye opener to um this sort of process and what i do in my studio so this has a little transparency you see that so you don't want to have a clear adhesive that would go over that so using this mortar this is polymer fortified thinset with water i'm going to what we call back butter my piece of tessera my found object and i'm going to get a really good layer on here and flip it over and give it a really good push there we go and yeah there's like stuff squeezing out everywhere right and you'd be like oh that's bad how do i clean that up so i have this italian spatula but you can use pretty much if i had another one of these here you could use that but you do want to clean up around because let's say you're like oh it's dinner time i'm leaving i don't want to work anymore and if you just leave that that big white thing there is gonna become a big hard rock and it's gonna be a mess to clean up and it could sacrifice your peace and the last thing i wanna do is sacrifice this piece because it is precious and there's no two like it so i'm just cleaning up a little bit i have a wet rag here so it's better not to return it to your cup if you don't have to clean up and now i can continue working so in the um you know earlier today i had processed what we call processing some materials and what i'm going to show you is just a little more demonstration of how i create and again like i said this is a little bit of an inspiration from the piece that um is in the course so i'm doing a little focal point in the center which is you know you can be or it can't be in your mosaic art but in our elements focal points are important other things that are important is balance and bounce can be actually the odd numbers three five seven is what a lot of artists like to do when they're creating and i do too so did you see that little dippy thing that's because that screw is a little bit higher than the rest of the um or that washer than the rest of the mosaic so i'm going to add a little bit of a heavier layer of thinset and that'll just just gently push it down and now we're good to go so i'm um like i said i tried i did a really good job of pre-cutting and setting this but now it's a mess so who cares we're making a mosaic and a lot of times there's a thing called dry laying and when you go to apply your mosaic without the you know the adhesive and you just dry lay it out it'll be one shape and then you'll go to lay it with the um adhesive or thinset and it won't be the same it never ever happens uh the same and i'm not sure why i would have to study that a little bit more but it just doesn't happen but we are so the other thing to think about is color when you're creating a mosaic and so what i've done here is i'm kind of using the opposite sides of the color wheel or what we call complementary colors the blue and the orange and it just makes for visually a really nice um something to look at so um there's different things that you can really study about mosaic art uh once you get your you know hands going and your get your first pieces created and maybe in the chat if you guys want and i can see it after is um what have you created if you are new to mosaic art what kinds of things were your first pieces and how did you learn and did you experiment did you get adventurous or did you take an online course because lord knows i didn't um let's see here the other thing when you're creating mosaic art is to think about the space between the pieces and the space between the pieces is as important as the pieces themselves and that's how we keep the continuity and making our pieces have really nice um kind of not flow is the right word that just looks really nice so if you're jamming a piece in there just because that's what you have maybe it's not the right piece maybe it needs to be cut differently or maybe you just need to look for something else so don't feel like just because it's there it's the right one so as you can see all of my lines are lining up in this sort of really nice kind of they just have nice continuity to them and that's really important when you're creating mosaic art so that you can look at it and feel like it's um it gives you optical joy i guess is the word that we use sometimes and another fancy mosaic word is interstices interstices um and that is the grout joints that's another word for the grout joints but we want to always make sure those stay consistent all right we're almost there and then i think what i'll do is put some of this broken china around it and that i decided i would show you guys on camera kind of how i cut it and so this piece here i don't like that little thing that's jabbing out there so i'm going to take my nippers you always want to try and not nip your artwork your pieces over your artwork that's just uh um not professional and i'm not happy with this line here at all so i'm gonna take this out and you can always like well like i said you can try different pieces and see what works better so this piece is too big right here but if you lay it over a little bit you can sort of see where i could that's gonna be too much oh no that actually worked okay so we're gonna glue adhere this one down and then we'll come back and put this one in all right so now that the orange is down i am going to give you guys a quick demonstration on grouting as well so keep an eye on the time i'm just going to do a few pieces here because we'll have some questions and answers in about three minutes so as you can see i'm going to come in now with my wheel nippers and start to add a little bit of china here and you can see so here's something to think about too the level of this china is way lower than my tile so what do i do i've used all three different levels here and this would get buried in my grout and it's going to be a mess so we do a thing called floating so taking this really nice consistency of thinset we are going to add a really good layer of it and you're just going to drop it in there and we're not going to push down too hard and it didn't come up to the full level of the tile but i'm okay with that this is my pick i've had since 1996 got it from my dentist you could see it's well used and um tools are really important in the mosaic world as they are in most art world so here this is still a little lower than i actually like so i'm going to pull it out and add even a little more so floating is really important if you're working on a piece and you want to keep your tessera at the same level and you're going to see it's going to look messy for a second but we can clean it up working clean is really important too so i keep my rag close by and you can see the tops of my tiles have little to no thinset on them and that's really important to me i don't like to work messy i don't want the extra work at the end and it could sacrifice the piece if anything has to really dry or cure and then has to be cleaned up all right so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to put this aside because this took a little longer than i thought and i'd like to give you guys a quick demonstration on how i grout so i'm going to bring in this quick little stained glass quilty piece i made yesterday when you are grouting you never want to grout the same day you created unless you're using stuff called rapid set which is like a rapid setting thinset and a lot of people like art they're getting into it as a hobby but you have to remember that when you create mosaic art you're using materials that are used for construction grade as far as quantity and as far as materials so don't be surprised when you want to go buy a bag of thin set and it's 50 pounds or 25 pounds and we buy thin set that ranges anywhere from 13 to sixty dollars a bag depending on what we need so that's another thing to consider is if you're just getting started using thinset is great more it's mortars another word for it is really great to use but you just have to remember you're using construction grade materials to create your um hobby your mosaics the other thing about thinset is it has a one year shelf life so you want to check the date on the bag when you buy it because a year after that it's not going to be good anymore and we have to consider that as professionals if you're making art for yourself i'm not going to tell you that at 13 months go throw your bag away but i just think that's something to think about if it's two years old it's definitely not going to have the integrity it should so this is now premixed grout and this is a medium color and a lot of people ask what color they should grout their mosaics and that is a big topic that is covered in the online course so this is just a medium gray and i'm just going to give you a really quick demo on how i um how i grout and i like to use tile sponges and you want to make sure you wring out all the grout and um so when you are using it i'm going to actually just splat it onto splats a very technical word but um i'm gonna um just uh the the um taking this sponge i'm going to in small circular motions it all in and i'm going to put this here it's about to become a big mess doing a mini version of this is probably more challenging than if it were big but just wanted to really give you guys a quick demo of grouting and how using the circular motions really helps you get into those interstices and when you're doing stained glass it helps to like kind of drag the sponge along the edges and you want to get off of it as much as you can of the um of the grout off of the glass and now coming in with my second sponge i'm going to now do a swiping motion and this has six sides to it so this is a larger mosaic i want to make sure i only use one swipe per side so we're going to swipe and now i'm going to swipe on another part of the sponge and now i'm going to swipe on another part of the sponge and now you want to get to that level of cleaning off your mosaic just like that now in a perfect world i would say that um we'd sit here and let this dry or cure and clean off our edges really good but we're running into a little bit of time and air and you probably want to come back and maybe there's some questions and i can show this at the very end as it's been dried off absolutely tammy i will say splat is a technical word i uh very impressed with that um folks i know that a few different questions have been in the chat i'll try to grab uh in no particular order and if i missed one i apologize feel free to resend it and i'll bring it up um one that just actually came in was how much adhesive should you apply let me bring that on screen um how much should your adhesive should you apply enough that it can squeeze up a little bit from underneath your tessera but if it starts squeezing out to the level of your tile whether it is stained glass or ceramic tile you're going to have a lot to clean up and so it's always better to go a little on the left side than on the too much side because the cleanup with too much adhesive can become really um challenging uh thank you so much for that timmy again another question i wanted to grab that i thought was super cool is sarah would like to try mosaic bowling ball uh mentioned weld bond any thoughts on this question yeah you know i am i have never mosaiced a bowling ball i know they were the big um fad for a while i have always created my own spheres with polystyrene and concrete and those are going to last forever weld bun does not work outside it is not meant for any kind of exterior mosaic so if you do want to try the quick seal with a bowling ball it's the fact that it's a slick surface is sometimes some people say it's they you know you can see on social media that they've lasted forever and other people will tell you that there's a fallen apart and a lot of it has to do with the elements if you live in a drier or you know mild climate you might be okay if you are living in a freeze thaw you're probably going to have issues with parts of it falling off got it sarah very cool uh emoji for your youtube as well uh next question i want to grab is speaking of dap and exterior do you want to comment on this yes it is great for um it is great for uh outside it is fine it is a waterproof um product and there's other ones out there like ge silicone that is good too one of our artists does her mosaic on stone course and her surfboard course using the ge silicone same kind of thing that these are fine for exterior grade mosaics got it the oops wrong question the one i wanted to grab and hello to that person i brought up but the the question is when you were cutting glass obviously you're eyeing a lot of things up you know why didn't you use a ruler you can use a ruler and if you are going to use a ruler you're always better off to use a ruler that has a cork back on it because then it won't slide around on your glass as you're cutting plus it raises it up a tiny bit so that your wheel this tiny little wheel does not get stuck under the um ruler and sometimes will rip the ruler with uh trying to score the glass but yeah i just did a quick you know demonstration but yes i if i need to i use a ruler but i've been also cutting glass for 15 years so connie well tammy before we get into the rest of the questions and folks we do have a few minutes left so don't worry i promise i see more questions coming in i did want to take a second and can you speak a bit more about your course actually just because you are you are giving uh some more level of a promotion for the next few days as part of this workshop can you just give a quick mention of that and we'll get into the rest of the questions yeah you know so mosaic arts online when we first started did not have a beginner course and it became very obvious that there needed to be some place for people to start and so that is why we created this course which teaches you a lot more a lot more in detail how to start from the beginning and this is created on wedding board and we do the proper hanging hardware um installation so this goes a lot deeper into teaching how to cut the materials how to use the different adhesives um grouting using a focal point talking about art elements and things like that so yes we are offering a discount and if you are new to mosaic art or you only have looked in books or you've tried just learning on social media then this is a great deal and a great um jumping off point to really and all of our courses once purchased uh never expire and we have payment plans and all that kind of stuff and thank you so much for that tammy because i know you're giving thirty dollars off that's only for the next seven days uh you know your course is not typically when you discount so this is something you offered for our audience and we did appreciate that um i just put that link in the youtube chat in case you are interested in checking out tammy's course it's also in the youtube description and we'll make sure it's in the email with uh some of the other links that tammy mentioned during the workshop yeah if you're ready i got more questions yeah go ahead cool uh let me grab this one do you ever do mosaic on glass is the clear quick seal good to use if you're gonna do um i have never done it i don't do glass on glass and i know that we do have a great course here with precision cutting with stained glass that is all about glass on glass and the right adhesive to use you can try it will dry clear sometimes when you do glass on glass you really have to make sure that air can get to the adhesive to cure and sometimes that can be challenging so i am not a professional on glass on glass but there are a lot of other artists out there and jennifer coons has a great course at mao on that and i think someone in the comments actually even mentioned that as an answer for that one too so thank you for that um more questions on depth in particular is depth good for a bird bath yes yeah definitely will um hold up under um water submersion the thing you have to consider with water submersion is your grout and i am a huge fan of epoxy grout but that's like a whole other you know sort of um learning curve on that but epoxy grout is very strong it's meant for water submersion and um so if you are going to do that and it's also good because it can be a little bit healthier for the birds because there's no cement that is can release itself kind of like cement grout can next question regarding the frames the round frames for doing a garden table any recommendations on where to go i don't i i had frame i had table frames made for me that were square over the years when we used to teach a tabletop class at the santa barbara school but you can look in garden shops you can go to thrift shops you know all those kinds of things and then it's just figuring out your substrate on top because sometimes they can sit into the frame but sometimes they sit on top so you really have to consider your substrate and how that's going to work on top of a round garden table but they're fun they're beautiful and you can look online i mean if you google table frames nowadays everything is online and i'm not used to it because i never had it uh another question is what is the difference between go board waiting board and hardy board that's a great question so go board and weddi board are pretty much the same technology that they're extruded foam with a cementitious mesh over them or saboticious sort of material over them the go board like i said they use a lot of fiberglass unless they have changed it but three years ago four years ago we talked to them they knew they needed to i had cut a bunch of go board and i got really bad rashes from the fiberglass on my arms wedding board is my go-to i just love it because it's so rigid and i create all most of my substrates with it hardy board or hearty backer is 90 um cement with a 10 paper sort of material mulch kind of thing and it is water resistant versus wetty and go are waterproof so that's something to consider uh hearty backer is the least expensive it's harder to cut but technology has moved you know because these are all meant to be like the substrates for showers and countertops and things like that again in the construction world that we are trying to manipulate and use for ourselves and so that's the difference between them rapid fire you are just a wealth of resources uh the next one when does one use quick set for thinset well that's a really good question so if you're grouting and you don't want to make a big mess you don't want to buy thinset i'm a fan of the quick dap quick seal but it depends who you're talking to you know if you start getting kelly knickerbocker one of our teachers involved she'll be like all about the thinset mortar only but she does not grout her pieces if you are not going to grout do not use the dap quick seal because you will see it in between your pieces and it can be a mess so it's really if you are doing something that's grouded you could go that way or you can um use it i do have some pieces that are made with mexican small tea that are not grouted and we use the dap quick seal but you really have to be good about pushing your pieces really close together and we have time for one or two more questions let me just grab one of these here and i want to show really quickly the last part of the grouting now that it's kind of dried uh do you want to show that first and we'll grab one of the last questions sure i'll show you so i'm sorry this will just be this way but you can see how this has gotten a really like kind of we call this a haze phase so now i'm just going to take my uh usually i would take a lint-free rag but we didn't have one in the studio at the very minute i needed it which is okay so but what i'm doing so weird to do this on camera like this but i just wanted to give you guys the full demonstration and so now with the sand that is in the grout we have this really pretty reflective stained glass grouted piece so the sand can do a good job exfoliating off any little bits and so there you go that's the final part of the demonstration but happy to answer a question or more we're running up to time i'll grab uh we'll grab one more let me using costume jewelry in a piece yeah you absolutely can you just want to if you're going to growl you probably want to tape it off so that it doesn't get a lot of grout in it again another course salvaged treasures by caitlyn hepworth is another great course here at mosaic arts online and she does exactly that in one of the third section of that um amazing online course but yeah you absolutely can and again you probably want to use some kind of viscous sort of adhesive to put it into your piece but focal points like costume jewelry can be really fun very cool well before we sign off i know we're already at time i do want to say for everyone who's been with us and watched this you know very fun hour of a workshop let's let tammy know in the comments we appreciated her giving this time you know this was a wonderful thing it was it was fun to watch and be a part of um let us know in the comments you know let's thank tammy and let her know what you appreciated uh any last words of wisdom that you would share out tammy for these folks who are aspiring or current you know mosaic artists a hundred percent just experiment try things out don't feel like we have all the answers because we usually don't but i am happy to share everything i know but i was raised as a mosaic artist just experimenting with things i had 48 inch mosaic table that was a commission that i made the wrong way on the wrong substrate that folded in half as i was taking it to grout it so you know it's all about if i don't i never had that experience and made that mistake and had that failure which is such a huge part of learning and not a bad thing then i never would have known what was wrong and how to do it right so i am huge into skinning your knees and figuring it out and being a part of our community which you know mosaic arts online is growing so much and we're so thrilled that more and more people are finding mosaic art it's a wonderful art to play with and learn and and we appreciate you sharing the growing community with our audience with this audience today yeah tammy thank you again that was wonderful uh we're gonna sign off in just a few seconds folks like i said any of the links that we discussed we'll make sure we send out if you enjoyed just watching this on today's channel feel free to subscribe hopefully tammy comes back we would love to host her again in the future i love when she does these workshops uh and with that we're going to be signing off thank you everyone thank you

Channel: Teachable Discover

Views: 2,608

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Mosaics, Tami macala, Art, DIY art

Id: 91Sx_zEzhu0

Length: 62min 5sec (3725 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021