Awesome Joolie

Hey, I am working on a pretty involved project this summer!

The design might look familiar to some of you.

I used transfer paper to get the design onto the board.

Then I outlined the faces with little black tiles.

Then I started to fill in the eyes. This took me over a month; I had to cut each tile by hand to fit. 

The tile-cutting technique used to approximate a curve is called keystoning, and I got a lot of practice in it.

Sometimes it went well for a good stretch, and sometimes it got ridiculously fiddly. If I had to do it over again I would've drawn  the faces larger; I'm having to fudge some stuff to make the current design work as it is.

Yay! I finally finished filling in the eyes on Sunday. I felt triumphant--for about half an hour. There's still a lot to do here. 

Having to take frequent breaks to keep my back limber and peel globs of gross dried glue off my fingers is not speeding up this process at all, either. 

Sometimes I wish I'd started doing mosaics years ago, but I seriously doubt I had the patience for it until recently. I sort of can't believe I have the patience now. Getting older is cool in a lot of ways.

I was delighted to realize the mouths are going to go relatively quickly. It took about 20 minutes to fill all this in before work today.

I'd like to be finished with this in a month, but I can't tell if that's realistic or not. Probably not, but I am going to tile like hell and see. Onward!

(And no, I never finished the fox. Maybe by Christmas.)