Ben Cuomo

As I am beginning to start to think how I will create my mosaic I need to first come up with the material I will use. The section of the Delos House of Dolphins I am choosing to recreate is a singular dolphin surrounded by tile. The dolphin is a grey-ish color and the tiles surrounding are white. Because of this, I am less focused on creating the perfect color matches and more focused on making sure the shape of my re-creation is very recognizable in relation to the shape of the actual mosaic. Therefore, the materials I have chosen to use are pony beads. Specifically white and grey beads for each part of the mosaic respectively. In my opinion, they are not too small to the point where they will be too hard to put down, but also not too big to the point where the image won’t be detailed enough. These are pictures of the pony beads I am planning to use:

I am also planning on using craft foam to create borders to separate the beads. My reasoning for that is that I will allow me to form outlines to make sure the mosaic is really accurate and also as an alternative as adhering all of the individual beads down. I got this idea from a video I saw on YouTube, here is that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPEJWe2wdgo. Specifically, from 6:10-6:20, you can see how putting beads down is very easy using this method.

I will make this re-creation of my mosaic on a piece of poster board. This will allow me to have a uniform background and also a singular place to keep it. The problem I am most anticipating facing is keeping the beads in place. I am using the borders to help, but I would not be surprised at all if the beads get pushed out of place multiple times throughout the process. Gluing them down would help, however the round nature of the beads would make it hard and, in my opinion, not worth it to do. I’m hoping that my recreation is a very close, almost mirror like image of the original mosaic created thousands of years ago. So far in life I have used beads to make many things, because of this previous experience I felt inclined to use these materials to recreate this mosaic as best as I can. Another thing from life which has influenced me to used pony beads is mosaics and other pictures I have seen recreated before.

Mosaics such as these have led me to the conclusion that using pony beads can help create very accurate recreations of mosaics. Something I really like about this specific mosaic is the color distinction. You can see the clear difference in colors, and it helps to create a clear picture of what is being shown. This is something I hope my audience sees in my mosaic as well. I want for them to see clear color distinctions. Having this will allow them to get a better picture and hopefully see a closer recreation to the original mosaic.

Here is another source that influenced my decision, I won’t be following everything from this, but I will definitely use a good amount of it during the building process: https://www.ehow.com/how_7546730_create-mosaic-beads.html