103. Elephant

I've taken a sabbatical from this blog since November, all the while feeling bad about it. I've also taken a sabbatical from church, all the while feeling bad about that too, which is another story. I did finally finish Rachel's elephant. For the most part, I am okay with it, although there are a few problems.

The positives--the first impression I have is that the piece works. It's a bit large, but that works in its favor because the elephant is a large animal. The most successful aspect of the piece is that the elephant's eye communicates a certain sad dignity that I hoped would translate to the glass, and it seems to.

I enlarged the image enough so that I could get the detail of the complicated texture of the elephant's skin, and I think that works also. I've done this enough to understand the lower limits of size, which is about a millimeter square. Some of the pieces in the leg area are just a bit larger than that, but it gives a good sense of complexity. I'm also happy with the flow of the black background pieces, which sometimes don't feel quite right, but here it feels right.

I worried all through making this piece about the light and dark shading, and for the most part I think it came off okay. I was worried about the image as a whole being too dark, but it's about in the middle where I wanted it. I was also worried about the portion of the image where the ear is in the foreground and the elephant's body is in the background, because in the past I've had a hard time shading the image so that foreground and background are distinct enough from each other. Here, I cheated in a few spots just a bit to make it more obvious which is which, and I don't think I overdid it, so I feel like the ear sticks out enough. Additionally, I wanted to capture the complex surface texture of things like the trunk and the ear, and I think that worked pretty well.

Learning curve: a few problems. Well, first of all, my border is too thin on the bottom, too wide on the right. It's less noticeable with the grout, but it's there. The only other problem is that the grout is just a bit too light, so the shadows are not deep enough. I might be able to remedy that some with a sealer that will darken it, but probably not enough. (I started with a black grout, added just a bit of gray--I thought I had it right, but I overshot it. I should have only added just a touch of gray, as they say.)

On the whole, I'm happy with it. Next, I'm doing a border for a mirror for Nan. So now I'm back to the least fun aspect of making mosaics, which is figuring out the design.