BUNDLE: Kickassiette & FUNdamento with Kelley Knickerbocker

In this Bundle Option you can now dive deep into the world of Kelley Knickerbocker and two of her amazing online courses. Read below to learn how Kelley takes the word "andamento" and adds a little FUN to it! Next you can learn how Kelley takes your average serving plate and bowl and turns them on their head to become one of her signature courses, "Kickassiette." You will never look at your crockery or china the same way! Read below the detailed description of each of these courses and enjoy a little savings too.

"FUNdamento"

Mosaic Arts Online is thrilled to present Kelley Knickerbocker and her unique spin on andamento, titled FUNdamento. Kelley began her mosaic explorations by reassembling random shards of broken materials and found objects. And that’s a good thing, because fitting those come-as-they-are shapes together honed her sense of visual/spatial unity. In other words, the ability to match up sides and angles of disparate shapes to reveal their unique harmony.

In FUNdamento, Kelley takes you to the next level and explores using wheeled nippers to cut specific shapes with specific intentions of direction and flow. This intentional expressiveness is what in classical Italian mosaic vocabulary is called andamento. Exploring this process together and learning from each other is what Kelley calls FUNdamento!

Kelley teaches this course by building a simple three-section mosaic seascape while analyzing three different types of andamento (circles, squares/rectangles, and classic linear) and you will learn how to construct them, how to combine them, and how to decide which is most useful when.

By using the direct setting method into thinset mortar, you will get a bit of an education on how height differentials work with no grouting! Kelley will discuss a little about design (simplicity vs complexity, hard edges vs organic, transferring to substrate), a fair bit about process (preprocessing materials, order of construction, adding unplanned elements), and address a few color issues (variety in a single-color field, boosting the vividness of colors) as they arise.

The main focus of this course will be on shaping: coaxing circles from squares, a foolproof trick for perfect keystoning angles, keeping randomness random, consistent inconsistency, creating/reinforcing directionality when you want it, diverging a line with a piece shaped like a pair of underpants (yes, really!), and more.

When you’ve completed this course you’ll be conversant in three andamenti, you’ll be a better cutter of materials, and you’ll have gained the confidence and skill to be intentionally expressive with both directionality and randomness in your mosaics.

"Kickassiette"

Mosaic Arts Online is thrilled to have Kelley Knickerbocker share one of her unique and creative approaches to creating mosaic art. You will never see crockery, broken china or your grandma's tea cups the same again. Kelley brings her enthusiasm and knowledge of not just how to create mosaic art with these broken items, but also touches on important abstract art principles such as composition, balance, movement, negative space and continuity.

Kelley takes you step by step through picking a palette, cutting various types of crockery to isolate/save their unique features and maximize their potential as mosaic tesserae, and composing and designing mosaics with crockery. And along the way she illuminates the magic of embedding crockery tesserae directly into mortar/thinset such that the mosaic is structurally stable, doesn’t require grouting, and takes on a sculptural quality.

With the techniques Kelley lays out in this online course you’ll have the knowledge you need to confidently create an entire abstract mosaic from crockery or add the sculptural dimensionality of crockery to your own unique mix of materials in a mosaic.

There is a PDF to download that has all the tools, materials and resources to get started.