Ben Cuomo

Starting off, I’d like to make it known that I am not the greatest artist, however I tried my best and this is what I got. During the process of creating my recreation I didn’t face any challenges, however I did vary off my original plan of attack quite substantially. Instead of using poster board, I went into my garage and took an amazon box. I then broke it down and got the base on which my mosaic would be created. Then, the first thing I did was draw an outline. This was to make the process go smoother for me and also to try and stay as close as possible to the original mosaic.

I used a black sharpie to create the borders and then created the lines inside that you see as guidelines to where I would place my white. Also visible in this picture is craft foam surrounding the tail, originally, I was planning on sectioning off areas with foam to make the items I’m using stay, but it wasn’t working how I expected, so I just decided to go for it and not using anything to adhere the “tiles” down. I knew that was a risk but luckily nothing bad happened in the end.

The next step in my process was laying down the black beads. Originally, I was planning on using grey but when I looked at the image again, I saw a darker grey, and the only grey beads I could find was a light grey so I decided that black beads would work better.

I laid down all the black beads first for one simple reason, the white ones hadn’t come in yet, and unfortunately, they weren’t going to make it in time. Because of this I had to adapt and decided to use rice. At first it may seem like rice would be much harder to use than beads, however as I started to lay it down, I realized I could just sprinkle rice in between the beads that were already down. This realization vastly cut down the time it took and, in my opinion, also helped with the look of the mosaic. My next step was adding red lentils. This was nowhere in my original plan, however when looking at the mosaic again I noticed a red outline around the nose and fin of the dolphin. These were hard to lay down due to the size but in the end, I think the addition of them definitely helped.

This was my original finished product, however after looking at it I realized that it resembled more as a whale than as a dolphin. Due to this I added some more black beads and came up with this:

Overall, I don’t think this is a perfect recreation, and looking back I probably would have tried and found a darker grey thing to use in place of the black beads. However, I gave it my best shot and in the end am happy with what I came up with.