Beans Bonanza!

Peter Kelly 10/29/2022

I have finished my mosaic. The way I went about doing this was I first drew my outline with a pencil. I originally planned to do a boat, but I realized that doing the fire would be easier because it has more straight edges. After I drew the base, I began to hot-glue the beans down. I quickly realized that I couldn’t wait too long after gluing, because the glue would harden and not be sticky anymore. I also found out that I couldn’t do too long of a section at a time, since it took some precision to stick each bean onto the glue without burning myself (which ended up happening 11 times), so I had to do short spurts and be careful about the precision. One of the challenges was using hot glue. I had never really used hot glue before today, and one thing that annoyed me the whole time was the strings that kept coming off of the poster board and beans after I stopped gluing. They got everywhere, including on my clothes and on the floor. What I did is I glued beans down for edges of a section, so as to create a barricade. I then dumped beans into the well created by the edges, so much of the beans are not glued to the posterboard. This made it easier to fill large sections at a time. I tried to make it look similar to the flame depicted in the mosaic by making the grey sections black beans and the white sections navy beans. This project took me about an hour and a half in total, with most of that time spent on gluing each individual bean down of the barricade. I feel pretty good about how it looks, because I can definitely tell that it is similar to the mosaic.