Many of you reading the previous blog asked about the preparations. Yes it took a lot of preparations and a lot of time to make this community mosaic event happen.
The idea to turn one of my first impressions of Beijing into a mosaic lingered in my head already for more than one year. Meeting Thomas Denker at the joined BAMM (British Association of Mosaic Artists ) And DOMO e.V. (Deutsche Organisation für Mosaikkunst) in York 2019 and getting to know his very interesting computer generated photo mosaics, gave me the idea to try and use this technique for a mosaic produced by a team. After a few playful trials during spring 2020 it turned November when I seriously started to develop the designs with my assistant Zhu Shui. She helped with her photoshop skills to make the photo collage – a caricature of a typical Beijing scooter set in front of a landmark building in Beijing, the Wanjing SoHo.
In December 2020 Thomas in Frankfurt rendered the image into 18 pixallated mosaic segments and produced the color chart and material lists for each segment.
In January 21 after finding all the 116 shades of colors in my material stock (this took me about one week going through all the glass mosaic tiles I have) 9 volunteers helped cutting the tiles into 5000 pieces.
Video clip about sorting and cutting material
The two project assistants Zhu Shui and Yuan Hang assembled most of the material boxes counting out 426 tesserae for each box in up to 60 different colors per box and helped preparing the work boards with the numbered sheets for each segment.
The day before the “mosaic happening” my friend Barbara helped with her practical glance to arrange tables and chairs so that 18 workstations were arranged in my studio waiting for the 21 participants to come.
