Even with a detailed mosaic pattern, you can still end up with a finished piece that isn’t what you expected. Most mosaic artists, especially novices, get into the rhythm of laying tiles and somehow veer off course. This isn’t always a dramatic phenomenon. Sometimes the spaces between tiles get progressively larger. Sometimes a curved line ends up being a bit more angular than you intended. Sometimes a frame doesn’t seem to match both sides of the art piece anymore. Fortunately, learning how to execute your mosaic designs as planned is a matter of practicing a few simple exercises and developing a few key mosaic skills.
The first thing to keep in mind is that laying mosaic tiles is a matter of playing with shape and direction and space and how each of these elements affects subsequent tiles. If you place a tile at a rakish angle, you will probably find yourself placing subsequent tiles at the same angle, and if you do this for very long, you will have changed the direction of a whole section of your mosaic. Before you start applying adhesive, lay a few tiles out on your work surface and see the direction they make. Then pick them up and lay them out again with one detail changed: they might be closer together or they might make a more gradual turn or they might have a more regular edge. This is a great exercise for training your eye to see how the laying affects the art piece long before anything has been made permanent.
One of the most common mistakes people make is to look at each individual tile and fail to see how groups of tiles work together. One tile might be cut in a way that you like, but when you surround it with other tiles, you might find that it disrupts the movement of a section. The solution to this problem is to stop laying tiles every so often and step back from your mosaic and look at it from a distance. Don’t look at the tile you just placed; look at the cluster of tiles you have been laying.
Ask yourself if they seem to be going in the direction you want them to. Ask yourself if the spaces between them appear to be consistent. Ask yourself if the shapes seem to match. Another very common mistake is to start laying tiles in several locations at once instead of completing one section and then moving on to the next. When you work in multiple locations simultaneously, you tend to establish different directions in different places, and sometimes they don’t flow together very well. It is always easier to control the direction of your mosaic if you establish it in one place before moving to another.
If you find that you have started laying your mosaic in such a way that it is going off in a direction you hadn’t planned, don’t try to correct this by laying lots of little “filler” tiles to force it back on track. That usually ends up making the problem even more obvious. Instead, remove a few of the tiles you just laid and see if you can figure out where you went wrong. Maybe you turned too sharply. Maybe you laid a tile that was larger than the others, and it forced you to leave bigger gaps. Fix the problem instead of the symptom. If you are laying around a curve, you might try laying a few tiles with a dry run to see if you like the way the curve lays. Sometimes the curve will be much more fluid if the change in direction is more gradual and takes place over the course of several tiles instead of all at once in a single tile.
You can practice laying tiles in a controlled way to help minimize the risk of your mosaic going off in the wrong direction. Set a timer for fifteen minutes and practice laying tiles. The first five minutes should be spent laying a simple straight line of tiles without adhesive on the back. Focus only on making sure the spaces between the tiles are equal. The second five minutes should be spent laying a gradual curve of tiles that are similar to the ones you used in the straight line. Focus on making sure the curve is smooth and gradual. The last five minutes should be spent comparing the straight line and the curved line to see if the spaces between the tiles got a little larger or smaller in either place. Simply comparing the two will help you recognize when the spaces are getting uneven in the future. This simple exercise will help your eye learn what to look for, and you will recognize when your mosaic is getting off track at an earlier stage.
One of the biggest things you can do to make sure your mosaic turns out the way you expect is to slow down and be patient. Many people who are new to making mosaics tend to think that the faster they work, the better they must be getting. The opposite is true. The slower and more patiently you work, the better your mosaics will be. A good mosaic, no matter how randomly the tiles are placed, has a certain sense of order to it, and the better you get at making mosaics, the more order you will see. This is because the better you get, the more you will focus on each individual tile and where you place it and how it affects the ones around it.