The Biggest Decisions You'll Make in Mosaic Art

You’ve taken on the joyful but sometimes arduous experience of finishing a large-sized mosaic art wall piece in the “chinoiserie style.” With this brings some equally big artistic decisions. Here are the major choices and actions you will most likely need to make along the way.  

Mosaic Art Decisions: Focal Point(s) Over A Background? Or Abstract and Diffuse?

Another way of saying this: Will your piece have a foreground and a receding background? For example, in a very traditional chinoiserie wallpaper, your eye will most likely go first to the various recognizable elements in the “front” which will dominate: i.e. flowers, birds, vines, and so on. Meanwhile, the background may be quite unobtrusive and will almost slip away behind your images and simply provide a backdrop to the characters in your tableau.  The same principles apply to mosaic.

Likewise, you may choose to pursue a more abstract and diffuse mosaic vision in which various elements do not sit atop a background but co-exist in concert with one another. The viewer may have a more subjective experience of deciphering beauty and meaning from the piece without distinctively recognizable shapes. Perhaps it may hint at or reinterpret known forms. This choice is uniquely yours! 

The artistic decision between figurative or abstract imagery is important because it will have some bearing on how much “background” supplies you will need to buy for your piece, and what order you will work in (i.e. focal imagery first; background later.).

The Spacing Style Between Individual Glass Pieces in Mosaic Art 

Will you lay your tiles/glass pieces almost nestled close together like puzzle pieces with very little space for grout between each one? Or will you place your individual pieces a bit further apart from one another so that the grout will have a major presence in your piece? 

Lots of grout greatly affects the final “look” of your piece. You may be very surprised when all is said and done, in how much the grout lines change your initial vision. Using a lot of grout between tiles can render easily recognizable forms unrecognizable if care is not taken. If it’s important to you that your viewer recognize something (like a tree, a leaf, or a bird)…take care about the amount of spacing between your tiles. 

Bear in mind that a lot of grout in the spaces between tiles leaves the piece open to more cracks and fissures in the grout’s texture over time, as it dries, recedes, or shrinks a bit after the grout dries. This is not usually a serious problem when there are smaller spaces between tiles.    

The Spacing Between Elements in the Mosaic Art Composition

Spacing between elements in your mosaic wall art composition is another consideration to make. This refers to the space between let’s say, a flower shape and an adjacent bird shape. How close together you place various elements in the composition will render your piece more “zen” vs. “busy” or textured. Cramming the composition with lots of exciting imagery, a multi-hued palette and lots of mirrored bling may make it perfect for a living area, but not necessarily a bedroom, if “mood” is a consideration. This is once again entirely your unique decision. Planning well for the spacing between individual elements in the “picture” will have a definite impact on the overall feeling put forth by your piece.  

The Palette of Your Mosaic Art Piece

 Color is such an important general decision in mosaic art. Envisioning the piece with its final colors in place (particularly the background if a background has been decided) is essential when planning out your work. These color choices affect the advance purchase of supplies and materials. 

Will your palette of glass or other materials be “de-saturated” (for example, soft hues in the same color family, like various shades of blue)? Or will the mosaic be “saturated” with bright hues, or a mixture of contrasting bright and pales? 

Physically laying out all the glass in the colors you plan to use, before setting out to work, will always give you an idea of a) how much glass will be available to use and b) how the colors will harmonize (or not) in your piece and c) how these colors may morph when placed next to one another in different configurations. Color is an amazing “living” thing and can change miraculously depending on what other colors it is adjacent to! 

Grout Color in Mosaic Art

The color you choose for your grout will have a tremendous bearing upon the final “look” and mood of your piece. If you are a technical expert at computer-aided-design (or enlist someone who is) for visioning the grout options on a screen or printout, (i.e. a graphic displaying various color scenarios), it may be helpful. But if not, you may need to be “old-fashioned,” and rely entirely on your artistic skills of visualization and taste to decide on your grout color. 

Research skills can help if you are willing to look closely at the work of other mosaic artists who use colored grouts in their work. As you sift through all this imagery online or in books, you will gain visual instincts for how various grout colors “read” against various color fields. Then, you would apply this knowledge to your own piece as you decide on grout color. 

Worry not—if you’ve chosen a grout color, worked it into your piece and find that it doesn’t suit your vision…You do have the possibility to easily change the grout with an overall re-grout (usually), and/or painting your grout or sections of it. 

A Hanging Piece or a Standing/Easel Display for Your Mosaic

The last decision you will probably make in the creation of your chinoiserie-style mosaic wall art, is whether or not to display your larger piece on the wall using professional art hanging hardware. Or will you display your piece with a floor-standing easel display? 

Not to be alarmist, but do always consider how much you could emotionally stand to “lose” your work if it came crashing off the wall. The heavier your piece, and the more laden it is with glass and bling…the more likely a crash is to happen. If you insist on hanging the piece but don’t use a professional handy-person to assess the state of the wall (is it plaster, wood, etc. behind the mosaic?) and install the proper anchors in your walls, a crash becomes a distinct possibility at some point in the future.  

Unlike most hung paintings, when mosaics crash off the wall, the destruction can be massive. You can literally lose the vast majority of your precious cut-and-paste work (and all the time you spent!). 

The final decision to “hang or not to hang” is yours but tread carefully when deciding how to display your gorgeous finished chinoiserie-style mosaic.