Mosaic Method

Mosaic Method – the illustration above shows the layered source of the mosaic image, Fall Colors Over Duckweed Pond. It is typical of my image mosaics. I took a series of hundreds of digital images for each piece. From them extracted a library of square images of a variety of sizes.

In this case I designed the layers so that the cell size times the grid size always equaled 6,144 pixels wide by 9,216 pixels high. Based on the cell and grid sizes I started with 26,520 images in eight layers plus the original image at the bottom. I don’t know how many sub-images remain.

As a sculptor and printmaker I then began to “carve” or “etch” away the extraneous images. This handcrafted work on multiple layers of photomosaic images is what makes these works Art, not simply the product of a computer software program. I worked from the top down since the largest sub-images tend to have the poorest match with the overall image. Nonetheless, where they fit they are very striking. I then continued to work down through the layers. The closest analogy I can think of is geological contour maps where each contour level is images of a specific size, The smallest image grid is at the bottom, the largest on top.

This process took between three to six weeks per piece, not counting the capturing and extracting of the digital images for each mosaic library.