I bought a second book on mosaic, and this one provided me with an Aha! moment. The book had a large section on design and talked about the fact that mosaic is as much about pattern as color. I hadn't thought about that at all, and my prior work showed it. With this one, I incorporated pattern as best I could. I love the combination of large and small tiles, but I am growing weary of ceramic tile. It offers me the larger size to make things like these petals, but the thickness makes it difficult to cut and it's prone to chipping.
Eventually, I will convert to making mosaic from actual mosaic tiles--thin glass and unglazed ceramic that comes in 3/4" squares. The more I learn about pattern, I can probably obtain the same effect with these petals using smaller pieces. The only edge I get from using these larger shapes is that no one seems to be doing it. I kind of like the originality of that....
