26 Oct Green River Station Glass Mosaic Panel

Green River Station, 2004
vitreous glass tile, steel frame
36″ H x 36″ W x 1.5″ D
Commission

My neighbor across the street lives in what was once the old train station, sometime around the turn of the century. He commissioned this piece for the exterior of his home. This was actually the most difficult mosaic I’ve done to date. I worked from an old B+W photo that I converted to color in my head as I worked. Getting the shading right on the train engine with only black, white and two shades of grey was really tough… the engine of course, is painted solid black and the only way to show detail was by getting the highlights right. The other tricky part was really capturing the features of the men’s faces at such a small size. The faces are about the size of my thumbnail. I feel I was able to really give them personality and a pretty good likeness to the guys in the photo even though most of the faces are done with less than a dozen pieces of glass. That was a major challenge! See below for detail images.

The smaller a mosaic is, the more difficult it is to get detail. If this had been twice as large, I would probably have been able to do the entire mosaic in less time than it took to do it at this size!

Below is the photo I worked from to create the mosaic. I first projected it on the wall and did a line drawing of the image, then used the line drawing as a guide to place the tile.