Mosaic Animal Eyes
Eyes? Aye, eyes. There is an almost infinite number of ways to make mosaic animal eyes so I thought that it would be useful to break the process down and figure out what makes a successful eye. After all, the eye is the most important part of the mosaic. Get it right, and the rest will fall into place. But get it wrong and the whole mosaic is spoilt.
When I say mosaic animal eyes, I don’t mean those hyper realistic eyes that look as if they might wink at you as you walk past. This is about eyes which are made with relatively few tesserae but which still manage to convey the sense of an eye in a mosaic-y way. We are dealing with hard, inflexible materials; with pieces, not with paint, and yet the eye is the most expressive part of any face and needs to be right.
Deconstructing eyes
I find it helpful to look at some examples up close. To see how the ancients did it, and then to take those lessons and apply them in ways that will help us now. I have taken a selection of mosaic animals and isolated the tesserae used to make the eyes. When you examine the construction of different eyes in this way, they seem to have relatively little in common.
Take this tiger’s eye:
And compare it with an owl:
The shapes and placement of the tesserae do not compare. They are constructed by different craftsmen in different locations in different centuries. It is reasonable to ask why one would even expect them to have anything in common.
But let’s look at other examples. Here, a fish from Alexandria:
And then a sea snake from Tunisia:
And a pigeon from Israel:
A pattern is beginning to emerge. There is a strong rim around the eye in most cases. More importantly, the deep black at the centre of each eye aways has at least one, but usually two or more, light tesserae next to it. Other mid tones are sometimes added, but the essential factor that unites all the eyes from different eras and different animals is the sharp contrast of tone within the centre of the eye: black against white or bright.
The ancients generally worked on a much larger scale than us. They made vast expanses of floor for palaces, bathhouses and domestic spaces. This meant that they had the room (and of course the labour) to make complex, intricate mosaics and could depict eyes with as many pieces as suited their needs. As a rule, we don’t have that luxury.
Simple ancient examples
However, not all ancient mosaic animal eyes are so complicated. This duck has distilled the essence of an eye down to four tesserae:
It does not have any less character or bird-ness than the other animals shown above. The essential detail – the dark against bright – is all that is needed to make the eye stand out.
Creating animal eyes
So let’s create our own mosaic animal eyes. Take a square, nibble away at the corners, and you have a perfect centre for the eye.
As you have seen, there are multiple ways to construct an eye, but an obvious solution is to surround it with keystones in lighter tones so that the eye gets the prominence is deserves. The keystones don’t all need to be white but could be in other light tones or even half light and half dark as in the examples below:
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Or we could simplify it even further and just use three light pieces next to the dark centre eye, placing them on the left if you want the eye to look left. Or switch them over for the eye to look right.
Here is another really simple solution for making mosaic animal eyes. Again, the one on the left is looking left and the one on the right is looking right:
To learn more and to understand the process in full, please watch my YouTube video.
Coming up soon: Seven Tips for Making a Community Mosaic