Working Projcet

Mosaics – Mixing Colors

When creating mosaics, utmost planning is required. Once you glue the tiles, it can be difficult to re-arrange them if you’re not satisfied with the results. Therefore, you need to do a lot of work before you start any mosaic project. One of these tasks is to mix the colors of the tiles properly.

When choosing color, you should consider its four qualities – temperature, intensity, tone, and hue.

Temperature refers to the color’s coolness or warmness. Cool colors include violet, green, and blue while the warm colors include yellow, orange, and red. You can mix these colors together to create a more interesting look. Intensity in the other hand refers to the color’s relative weakness and strength. For example, colors can be seen as muted or bright in terms of intensity. The tone refers to the color’s darkness or lightness. Hue refers to the purest form of color as seen in the spectrum. Typical examples are yellow, blue, purple, and red. Even if the hues are different, it can still have similar tones.

Now that you know the color’s basic qualities, its time to choose the size and color of the tiles suitable to your mosaic; you can start by choosing the color. This will depend on the image that you’re planning to create. At first, you can try different combinations. Don’t hesitate to experiment on the colors. Get tesserae of different colors and put them together; try to see which colors blend well. After that, you will now choose the tile’s size.

Again, this will depend on the details of the image. The size of the tiles has an impact on the overall appearance of the mosaic. Try to limit the use of silver or gold in your work because overdoing it can make your piece a dreadful sight.

Don’t glue the tiles yet. Instead place them over the image and look at your work from a distance. This is done to assess your work. For coloration of the grout or cement, you can use color pigments; however, these are more expensive than acrylic paint. On the other hand, you can use acrylic colors in different surfaces, making it a very good choice for mosaic artists; they can use the acrylic colors on MDF, card, paper, wood, and other surfaces.

Another important thing to consider is the grout color. It’s not a good idea to use white colored grouts because it gives a Mediterranean feeling since the eyes of the audience is easily drawn to the spaces between tiles. If you’re going to use highly colored tiles, you can you can use dark grout. If you use the dark-colored grout over pale tiles, it will simply dominate the tesserae.

Are you familiar with the color wheel? You can use it to create fascinating mosaic. If you want to distinguish the foreground from the background, you can use clean yet strong colors (foreground) and dusty or pale colors like creams, soft purples, beige, and pale blues (background).

Receding effects can be achieved by using purple, green, and blue while advancing effects can be created by using yellow and orange. To enhance 2 colors, use the primary colors and the opposite colors found on the wheel. You can also create strong outlines by putting tiles of different tones beside one another.

That’s how you can mix colors to create amazing mosaics.