paper mosaics, paintings, digital art, and mixed media creations by jaye coltharp
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Website Assistance FAQ:
Yes, Virginia, there is a drawing each month for free stuff! The prize is generally your choice of several items from my Cafepress store, and you can enter by signing up for the mailing list or purchasing some of my artwork. Good luck! Do you have a newsletter? Yes, and you can sign up for it here. I publish it no more often than once a month (usually once every two or three months), and I do not... I repeat DO NOT... share or sell email addresses with ANYONE. I'd love to link to your site on my website. Can I exchange links with you? I am more than happy to trade links to artist friends, sites I use and support, and relevant resources. If you think you qualify, just drop me a line via email and I'll certainly consider your request. I'll just let you know right now, however, that I won't link to pay-to-list art portfolio sites, other website hosting services, porn sites, discount medication sites, etc, etc. So just don't even bother me with those, ok? It's annoying. How do you do your mosaics? Nearly all my pieces start with a grid. I figure I have to use my drafting skills and trusty t-square for something after all those years in architecture school, right? So I pencil in a grid with a spacing somewhere less than 3/4 of an inch. Then, I go to my paper. Being a rather anal retentive artist at times, I have several small tubs filled with one inch squares of paper created by cutting magazines up with an Xacto knife. And I do seriously mean that I've spent time with a metal ruler and an Xacto knife painstakingly cutting whole magazines into one inch strips and then one inch squares. What I wouldn't give for one of those great high-tech paper cutters like the print shops have... Anyway, then the process takes one of several directions. Either I have a specific image I want to create, in which case I make a digital image -- a "sketch" of sorts -- on Photoshop and draw the appropriate grid over it and then assemble the mosaic square by square. I sort through my tubs of paper looking for pieces that have the appropriate colors, textures, lines, and patterns to closely resemble what's in each square of the gridded "sketch." Or sometimes I'll choose one color or pattern or whatnot and pick out a whole pile of pieces that fit that criteria. Then I'll spread them out on a table and let things fall together as they may. Series like "Chroma" and "Visual Static" come from this approach. And sometimes I just don't have a real direction when I begin. I really enjoy seeing what happens when I pick one random piece, glue it down, and then just look for pieces that will smoothly fit next to what's already glued down and let the mosaic build itself. See "Come What May" for an example of how that works. And that's basically it. I trim each piece as required and glue it in place on the grid using decoupage medium. My tried-and-true favorite glue is Mod Podge. I used Delta Ceramcoat's Decoupage Medium once and really loved it as well, but can't find it locally. Such is life. When it's all finished and dry, the whole thing used to get a sealer coat of decoupage glue, but now I prefer to use varnish. Makes everything look all shiny and polished, which is a nice touch as well as protective. And there you have it. A little labor-intensive, but I think that in the end the unique texture and effect is worth the work. How did you come up with your mosaic technique? Well, I spent the first two decades of my life lamenting the fact that I'd love to be a professional artist but that I just didn't have a single medium or style that I could really get behind for an entire career. I liked drawing, painting, ceramics, fiber art... You name it I'd dabbled in it, but I just couldn't see myself doing any of those things for long term. But I'd always been a nut for geometry and such. I remember back in second grade being really bored in class and taking notebook paper, drawing a grid on it with my ruler, and coloring a different pattern in each square just to kill time. Ever hear of tesselations? I took a class on them in gifted school way back in elementary as well. I've always liked those puzzles where there's a grid and an image broken into pieces and if you recreate each piece in the appropriate square you can see the whole picture. So yeah, for an artist I'm a bit of a geek. But this mosaic thing didn't really hit me until college. I think the first real seed was planted my freshman year in my first design studio class. We were given sheets of poster board and acrylic paint in the primary colors and black and white, and were given the assignment of exploring color mixology by gridding off the poster board and mixing a completely different color for each square. Most everybody in the class hated that assignment with a passion, but I thought it was super fun! And then three years later the epiphany came. I was sitting on the floor with some sorority sisters making little posters for the new pledges who were our "secret sisters." We were doing that thing where you cut out images and letters that, if you interpret them right, phonetically become a message. You know -- a female sheep, the letter R, a bowl of soup plus "ER" means "You are super!" And as I was searching through the magazines for the right pieces the idea hit me. There are some really great colors used in magazine ads and such that are hard to recreate in any other medium with as much vibrance and intensity. So wouldn't it be really cool to just cut out those colors and reassemble them like mosaic tiles to create other artworks? Within a month I'd started cutting up a magazine into squares. Why squares? Well, because it's a lot easier to focus on color and texture and such if you remove the pieces from their original context. i.e. I just want a red piece with a white line through it and I don't want to be distracted by the knowledge that it came from a picture of a model in a red dress with a white belt. And that's how I found my muse. Your mosaic work seems very similar to watercolor quilt techniques. Have you ever done this type of thing with fabric? I haven't personally done any quilting, although my grandmother was an avid quilter and I've seen a lot of watercolor quilts and think they're gorgeous. But for all you quilters out there, I have attempted to make a contribution to quilting by creating watercolor quilt patterns based on my work. If you're interested in my patterns, drop me an email. I would like to commission a piece of artwork. How much do you charge? My pricing structure is based on two things -- the size of the artwork and the number of little pieces of paper it's going to take to get the job done. I can recreate pictures of favorite places, do portraits, or create something abstract for you. Drop me an e-mail and let me know what kind of piece you're envisioning and we'll discuss cost and such with no obligation, I promise. I've found a piece I'd love to have but it's sold. I looked under prints and couldn't find any of this piece. Will you be doing prints of this piece in the future? If you can't find prints listed for the piece you have your heart set on, just send me an email and in most cases I'll be more than happy to do some prints for you. |