Mosaics 02: Magpies

This is my first tile mosaic project, a tv stand. The design is an Adobe Illustrator vector graphic, worked over a reference photograph found on the internet. I originally planned to just have one magpie, but since the rhyme goes ‘one for sorrow, two for joy’, thought I’d better have a pair of them.

Mosaics use Roman terminology – the magpie motifs are emblemata, the little building blocks are tessarae (a single block is a tessera) . There are names for the background styles, opus vermiculatum (‘wormlike’), which indicates that it goes around the emblemata in a wormlike fashion. In the reference books I’ve been looking at, most of the mosaics are done with special tesserae that are pre-cut as small solid coloured square tiles. But in the spirit of Antonio Gaudi (and to keep costs down), I’m using instead some very thick ceramic wall tiles kindly donated via Freecycle. The tiles are only coloured on one side and fairly difficult to cut by hand into small shapes, so I’ve used glass for the fine detail in the feet. I could have used tile for the beaks, but it would have looked awkward to only have glass in one place and magpies’ beaks are quite prominent. So I used little pieces of mirror under yellow cathedral glass – this gave a very interesting result. The yellow glass is fairly ordinary as glass goes, but the addition of the mirror below makes it sparkly in a very magpie-attracting sort of way. The mirror also helped bring the glass, which is quite thin, up to the near the same level as the thick ceramic tiles. There is an element of irregularity in the way the tiles are laid, especially in the white body area (the tiles are rounded into a sort of ‘arched’ effect). This means the table will no longer work as a tv stand when the mosaic is complete, but it’s going to stand outside in the garden as a decorative thing, so I don’t think that’s too important.