The Studio Journal · Craft
A mosaic design is transferred to the board one of three ways. Loose, painterly pieces are drawn freehand straight onto the sealed board in pencil or marker. Accurate work — a pet portrait, a landscape from your photograph, lettering — is scaled up with a grid or printed full-size as a cartoon and traced through. And pieces built by the indirect method are drawn in reverse on paper, because the mosaic is built face-down and flipped at installation. The likeness is won or lost at this stage: glass can be re-cut, but a drawing that drifted on the way to the board never recovers.
The oldest trick in the book still earns its keep. The reference photo or sketch gets a grid drawn over it — say ten squares across — and the board gets the same grid at full size. Then the design is redrawn square by square, which forces you to draw what is actually in each square instead of what your brain assumes a face, a beak or a ridgeline looks like. It is slow, it is unglamorous, and it is why a commission from a photograph still looks like your photograph at four feet wide.
For detailed commissions the design is printed at finished size — a cartoon, in the old workshop sense — pinned over the board, and the key lines are traced or pricked through onto the sealed surface. The cartoon then lives on the wall above the bench for the whole build. Values drift silently while you work: a sky gets darker, a shadow creeps. Checking the piece against the cartoon every hour or so is the difference between steering and hoping.
Shower walls and floors built face-down on paper need the drawing mirrored — lettering most of all, which has embarrassed more than one mosaicist at the flip. Panels built face-up on mesh or board are drawn the right way round, and abstract or landscape pieces often skip the cartoon entirely once the horizon and the main masses are marked: the andamento, the flow of the pieces, becomes the drawing as it is built. What never changes is the order — design first, transfer honestly, then cut glass. Cutting first and designing around the pile is how a bench fills up with beautiful, homeless pieces.
Grid for accuracy, a full-size cartoon for detail, a reversed drawing for indirect work, and freehand only where the piece is meant to wander. Every Lion & Crown commission starts this way — drawn properly before a single piece is cut, made to order by hand in Colorado Springs, small framed pieces from $650, murals and shower features $180–$250 per square foot, minimum 30 days in the studio and the Christmas order book closing November 15. Got a photograph you want turned into glass? Call or text 719-521-8312.
