Mosaic Hand Art

Hi, I created this fantastically colourful mosaic hand at the school that I work at. We wanted to create an art piece that every student and staff member at the school could have some input in. By choosing to do mosaic it allowed every person to place at least one piece of tile and so many children have worked past the finished piece and commented or pointed out the tile they placed. It was a fantastic inclusive project and everyone involved had wonderful fun creating it. While ours was very large it is quite easy to do on a smaller scale.

Mosaicing can be very basic and you need very few materials and most can come from old, left over or recyclable materials. I will list the things I used below.

1 x Sheet of ceramic tile underlay (mine was 2400mm x 1200mm but it depends entirely on the size of your project)

140 x Black 90mm x 90mm square tiles

10kg tub tile adhesive.

6 small tubes of mosaic cement

2.5kg tub of pre mixed white grout

Lots and lots of broken tiles ( we also purchased some additional packs of small mosaic tiles for extra colour as well as having lots of old tiles on site)

Our first step was to collect our tiles and start breaking them up. For safety I made a sealed transparent container out of a storage tub and cut two hand holes in it. Then we got groups of kids throughout the school to spend some time cutting the tiles into small odd shaped pieces.

Our next step was to create our design on a piece of grid paper. We then drew another grid on our sheet of tile underlay and by using the grid formation traced the design onto a much bigger scale. By having the same amount of squares on the paper as on the underlay made this task much easier. The squares on the underlay were also the same size as a standard tile, in this case 90mm x 90mm.

Next we decided to dummy try the tiles to see if we had enough and the whole project would look the way we wanted. There is a lot of small tiles in this project so we roughly shaped them into piles on the hand and everything looked ok !

To make the hand shape we had selected black tiles to really enhance the colour of the mosaic tiles of hand. We began by gluing each of the black tiles to their corresponding place on the underlay using the grid lines to make everything straight. It tight places or where there was only small sections we had to use an angle grinder and tile cutter to shape the tiles accordingly. We didn't worried if it was perfect because a hand isn't straight lines so this step is not essentially and you will end up with lots of odd shaped tiles to use when you cut and break them.

Once the glue is set it's time to grout the tiles. We chose to use a grey colour grout for the black tiles and white for the mosaic. To make the grey we split the pre mixed grout we had in half and tinted one part with a little black paint till we got the colour we needed. This is a great way to make any colour grout you need without buying all different colours.

There are lots of grouting YouTube videos which it's probably a good idea to watch rather than me explain it in great detail but essentially you fill all the gaps between the tiles with the grout then wipe away the excess with a wet sponge and clean water. A great tip is to change the water A LOT as it gets dirty quickly. This can take quite a while to do depending on the size of your project but is well worth taking the effort to do properly.

Once all the grout is dry it's time to start laying out the mosaic tiles ! It's best to use little glue tubes for this and just put a dob on the back of the tile and place it down. Do this for each tile and glue won't go everywhere. It's best to start around the outer edge and fill in all the small gaps first and then it's time to get really stuck in !

This part takes the most time by far but it's also the most fun ! Placing down all those tiles took hours but it was so much fun doing it with the kids and they all loved being apart of the project. It looks so fantastic and vibrant with all the different colours so keep pushing on and don't give up !

The last step is to grout the mosaic tiles ! The same process is used here as with grouting the black tiles so you'll have had plenty of practise at it by the time you get to here ! It takes a while but its great to see the whole thing coming together.

Once ours was finished we made a wooden frame and hung it on the wall.It looks so great and we've had so many positive comments about it ! I would definitely recommend giving something like this a go ! The skills involved aren't super hard and things don't need to be super accurate which is great when you're starting out. It's so rewarding and lots of fun ! give it a go whether it's a project on this scale or just a little table or small tile. Its well worth the effort to have something you can proudly say "I made that!"