FINISHING SCHOOL: Surface treatments for Mosaic with Kelley Knickerbocker

Are you working with a machine-smoothed material? What if you could selectively (or completely) give it some interesting texture?

Is your material interior color/reflectivity different from its outer color/reflectivity? What if you could remove a bit of that exterior to expose some of the interior loveliness, or remove all of the exterior on some tesserae and let the altered and unaltered sing together in complex harmony?

Are you using a shiny material? What if you could deglaze a handful of it and use the shiny and matte together?

Is that cut stone a little too pale? What if you could darken or "age" it a bit?

Want to alter the color of an open area of mortar to strengthen its visual connection to your mosaic? Let’s do that!

In this online course Kelley Knickerbocker, the perennial asker of “What if?”, has brought her creative process here to Mosaic Arts Online. Kelley has been inventively altering the surfaces of tesserae and mortar for nearly 15 years to add nuance, emphasis, and expressiveness to her mosaics. In this online course she’ll focus that accumulated knowledge on the how and when of three specific categories of surface changes: texture, color, and reflectivity, and step through multiple techniques to effect these changes on multiple materials.

Techniques include defacement, layered washes and rubs, gilding, read-through, deglazing and more. You can practice these effects on individual loose tesserae or build some simple, small sample boards of different materials to practice more extensively along with the course.

It wouldn’t be a Kelley workshop without some materials analysis, so of course you’ll be practicing on a variety of miscellaneous tesserae (a few types of glass, different types of glazed ceramic dishware or tile, a few types of stone, and unglazed porcelain) to contrast, compare, and transform. Each of these materials have different characteristics (porosity, transparency, hardness, etc.) that will determine which surface treatment technique will be most effective and when it will need to be applied. Learn which treatments need to begin as you’re processing your tesserae, and which can happen during or even after construction of your mosaic.