Merry Christmas and Happy Artwork to All!

Happy Holidays! This lovely mosaic is made of bottlecaps (amazing I know!) and I created it using the steps outlined in a previous post.   If you take a step back, you can see how wonderful the mosaic really is.

The mosaic is a gift to my brother in law who has a thing for Our Lady of Guadalupe.  I tried a number of images, including the classic with the Virgin floating on a cloud surrounded by roses, but this version was so pretty it quickly became my favorite.

Some of you may be horrified of the idea of The Virgin Mary made out of bottlecaps, many of them beer caps, but to me this artwork is spot-on  perfect.  The idea that beauty can come from unexpected, and sometimes mundane, places is very appealing to me.  And then there is something perfectly New Mexico about artwork like this - spirituality from simplicity.

Creating the Bottlecap Mosaic, Part 2

In the last post, I described the process for creating the mural image.  In this post, I'll show how th individual tiles were made.  All 24,000 caps were sorted into milk jugs and various sizes of plastic bags.  The point here is that all the caps had to be separated so I could find the appropriate cap for each spot in the mural.  When I was ready to create the tiles, I was surrounded by all my jugs and bags arranged by color.  Although this photo of my workspace on the porch doesn't look too messy, it also doesn't show the piles of stuff under the three tables.

The mosaic had been output as images of smaller tiles, each numbered by row and section.  I followed the image printed on the output sheet, selecting and arranging caps row by row. Once a tile was complete, the caps were moved to my magnetic display board (covered with plastic wrap).  The magnets kept the caps aligned and in the correct orientation during the next steps.  In retrospect, and FYI if you want to try this yourself, making the board was an incredibly useful move.  The project could not have been done without it.

The caps were cleaned with window cleaner (to remove dust, storage grunge & rust), then polished with rubbing alcohol (to dry them and remove any oils).  After a few minutes, the tiles were sprayed with a UV protective acrylic sealer.  Even though the samples at the cabin show no signs of fading after one year (see previous post), I wanted to make sure the colors last as long as possible.  The cabin is in a very dry climate, but protection against rust seemed like a good idea.  Just in case.

After 24 hours of drying time, a piece of tulle (for ballerina tutus) was placed over the caps.  Four dots of glue (equal mix of Elmers and Eileens Tacky Glue) were dropped onto each cap through the tulle.  Because I sealed the caps, regular glue wasn't adhesive enough to hold the caps in place.  As I've mentioned in previous mosaic posts, the glue/tulle combo keeps everything in together during shipping and installation, but allows for easy removal of the tulle at the end of the project.

Once dry, each tile was labeled (tile#, top, bottom, right and left) completely.  The entire mosaic fit into one large box and it was shipped to NM.  Next step installation!  Stay tuned...