Time gets a little wonky here. I'm typing these as I work and occasionally going back in to merge posts together. If any of my timing seems off, this is probably why. Time travel is tricky business.
Today I start the face. The dread, terrifying face. I decided to ease into it from around the edges, because actual features are really intimidating.
Beards are also quite tricksy. And I thought they were hard in paint. I fumbled about for a bit with a couple of different colors of tiles in the beard and then decide to just go for it.
Being mostly satisfied with this, it's time to bite the bullet and move on to the eyes. They are the windows to the soul, right? So in theory, if I can get them kinda close, I should be OK. I messed about with them for quite some time and then decided I needed to go back to the source and see how they did them.
There was some worry that the ones I did might be a little too anime, but looking back over some of the other Antioch mosaics, all the eyes have that sort of anime look a bit. They aren't quite the same dark-lined eye shape of the later Byzantine mosaics, but they are still very impressionistic.
Sidebar: This is also the point where, in looking at how eyes are done, I discovered that not all mosaics used uniform tile sizes. Check out these two:
The larger background fill tesserae are much larger than the ones used to make the faces. I feel better about my choice, knowing that earlier mosaic craftspeople opted for the same look. But I digress.
Back to the eyes. If I had gone with my original 4'x5' plans, I'd have a lot more space to do more detailed eyes. Instead, I tried to keep it simple and pointillistic. I kept stepping across the room to look at it and see if it felt right. This was a little hard to do since the piece was lying flat. Still, mosaics aren't meant to be viewed right up close. They need some distance to be seen correctly. In the end, I had this:
Filling in the cheeks was an easier task, and the lips and moustache went surprisingly well but then there was the nose.
Ah noses. Which don't really exist. Noses are evil. Worse than eyes. Worse than beards. All they are is shadow and highlight and much like eyes, if they are done wrong, it won't much look like the person you're trying to create. This was when I took a break for the evening.
In the morning, with fresh eyes and rested fingers, I gave it another try. The thing with mosaics is that unlike a drawing or a painting, you can put tiles down and pull them up pretty easily and infinitely. I spent the better part of the day finishing up just the nose.
Can you see the difference between the photos above? This is what today
was. Minute changes, one tile at a time. Trying to finesse it to look
as much like my source photo as possible. I must have a dozen photos of this stage. Move some tiles. Stand on a chair. Take a picture. Squint at the picture on my phone and see what didn't look right. Make adjustments. Repeat. This part was not meditative. In the end though, I think I got it close.
The portrait part is done! Now for the geometric background and words! I may actually pull this off!
No comments:
Post a Comment