The Big Bird

Tuffy P and I have been work on this owl mosaic for months. We finally finished it up last night and hung it out front this morning. All the tesserae have been cut from various tiles, broken dishes, bowls and vases using a little tile nipper which enables us to cut them to more or less custom shapes. The ground is 3/4 inch plywood and the cement is an acrylic compound which we’ve tested over a period of several years. The stuff seems to be indestructable. We don’t use any grout; we just sink the tesserae into plenty of compound.

Upping the scale on this, our third bird, gave us the chance to stretch out a little and mess around with different size bits, as well as different textures and introduce greater complexity to the whole piece.