Category: Mosaic Training

Mosaic workshops or training being conducted mostly in India and some outside.

Online Mosaic Courses 

Mosaic Arts Online is the brainchild of Tami Macala who had started the Santa Barbara School of  Mosaic Art in 2009. All paid 8 courses on offer at present are managed by expert mosaicists who have years of mosaic-making and teaching experience. For those in India, however, the courses will feel more relevant and a worthwhile investment when we can find materials like glass rods, smalti or wediboards locally. Even if these courses came with the prescribed materials, sourcing smalti or glass rods remains a distant possibility for us in India. And yet, I’m really pleased to see efforts being made to provide mosaic tutorials through web based technologies in a structured way. It’s high time that the art and craft of mosaic-making is seen as an area of learning and pursuit the world over.
http://mosaicartsonline.com/courses

Roman Mosaic Workshops is a website owned by Lawrence Payne and focused on the art of Roman mosaics. He has designed kits that he sells with instructions, written articles on Roman mosaics, provided reference material on ancient mosaics on his site, and he has also designed 3 paid online courses and made them available at the link below. These courses on the rules, patterns and methods of creating mosaics follow a structured approach to learn and practice the art of laying stone or ceramic tesserae along the lines of Roman mosaics.
https://yescourse.com/~/roman-mosaic-workshops/#!

Kasia Polkowska offers some of the most helpful video tutorials on YouTube on cutting of stained glass. On her online course website on the link below, Kasia offers a paid course on creating a stained glass flower mosaic. She gives a choice of 12 flower templates that one can download once registered for the class. Another online course on her beautiful stained glass owls is under preparation that would offer 18 templates of owl patterns to choose from to mosaic.
http://www.kasiamosaicsclasses.com/course/online-flower-class/

Brett Campbell Mosaics has a wonderfully organised website showing his mosaics segregated in different categories, selling designs and patterns to buy online as also providing 2 paid courses to attend online from the link below.
http://www.mosaics.com.au/learn-mosaic/mosaic-classes-online/

Sharras Mosaic Secrets offers 2 online mosaic courses. I have known of Sharra Frank as a bead mosaic artist but I see from her site that she does a lot of beautiful glass mosaic work as well.
http://sharrasmosaicsecrets.com/courses

I’m sure this is just the beginning, and increasingly learners all over would have many more choices to get educated online on mosaic-making by known artists of the world.

How to Start Making Mosaics

Note: This post is concurrently published at http://www.jyotibhargava.com

My previous posts attempt to share leads to tools, tiles and adhesives used in mosaic-making but an interested learner may still be flummoxed in the face of choices and may still wonder how to go about making a mosaic. My view is to follow the approach below.

Join a Mosaic Workshop Makingmosaics

If one can find a trainer, making even a small mosaic under guidance
demystifies the process of holding the nippers, cutting tiles, arranging their flow, sticking them and then coming to grips with the messy but all important grouting process. One may have How-to Project books, good Net bandwidth to watch video tutorials but there is really nothing as ideal as learning by doing it under guidance.

Since the last year that I’ve been running the Facebook group Mosaic India, I’ve learned of a few India based mosaic-makers who train as well. If you wish to connect with a trainer, join the FB group and enquire about trainers in  your city.

Learn to cut Stained Glass 

India has more Stained Glass practitioners than mosaicists. It may be, therefore, easier to track down a stained glass artist than a mosaic-maker. Reach out to artists in your city, request that they teach you to cut stained glass shapes. Traditional stained glass requires steps of grinding shape edges once they are cut, copper-foiling them and then soldering multiple shapes to create a composition or 3D piece. To make mosaics, a learner can get oriented on scoring and cutting shapes of stained glass, and then move on to the steps of sticking shapes and grouting the composition.

Buy a Mosaic Kit and Make it 

A small mosaic kit comes with materials and instructions on making a mosaic. The kit doesn’t carry any nippers but it does have pre-cut tiles and other essential items. Making a mosaic using a kit demystifies the basic steps involved in creating a finished mosaic and that can get many learners going onto more. In India, I’ve heard of only 2 sources of basic kits but on Amazon US I can see 8-10 kit options. They don’t ship to India but any friend from the US may be asked to bring you one.

Offer to be a Mosaic-maker’s Assistant 

Even those mosaic-makers who do not run workshops or teach in one-on-one sessions, may value help to finish their commissioned pieces. Be on the lookout for such opportunities to learn as you assist.

Just Make It 

If you have none of the above options available to you, just make a mosaic based on your understanding from How-to books or videos and get going. Ask questions, share your experience of making your first mosaic in the FB group and keep taking leaps beyond.

In the next post, I’ll describe the exact process of making a simple mosaic to help remove any further hesitation that a beginner feels.