Mosaic Technique

* Mosaic Technique*​

The What: Inspiration & Backstory
Today's technique scrap is inspired by a little trinket gift I bought myself.
Let me show you a photo:

It's a little dish with glassy mosaic tiles that was an impulse buy!
I looked at it and instantly thought about how I'd go about making a scrappy background like it - doesn't everything make you think about scrapbooking?

Anyway in this first half hour, i'll show you one way to achieve a mosaic-y look that we'll use as part of the Slow Scrap steps in the 2nd half hour.

What do mean by Mosaic?
Ok so to start with a loose definition of the look of a mosaic to me is:
* lots of small pieces that work together to make a bigger picture or piece.
* can be all the same shape (lots of squares) OR a mix of irregular shapes
* can be precisely aligned for a clean minimalist style OR 'perfectly imperfect' with slight rotations for a more rustic, handmade look
* variations in colour or tone to the tile pieces that add interest but contribute to pattern and a bigger design
* gaps between each little piece that give them definition (or grout lines if you think about tiles)

The How:
Using my trinket dish as a starting point, I made a very similar background using a square brush in Photoshop CS6 & my screenshots are below.

(You could make basically the same page several ways, (like with custom shapes and drag out a square, duplicate it and hand place it a lot to make a row, group those layers, then duplicate the group (row) several times to make a larger square) but the brushes make it quicker.
If you don't have a square brush, you can also make your own from a custom shape - if you need that let me know but I'll be using the square brushes PS has today).

It looks like a lot of screenshots but it's all about set up to make the paper clipping easy at the end!
And if you remember any of Farrah's LEAP lessons on Brushes, that is basically the first half of it, so it may look scary but it's like anything else, something that after a few clicks, it's an extra tool to give us digiscrappers a quick way to do something papery (with no real scissors or clean up!)
(Her LEAP tutorial is here https://the-lilypad.com/forum/threads/lesson-on-everything-about-page-design-leap-march-2021.76257/

We start by loading the Square Brushes - Farrah covered this in the LEAP if you need more.



Now we play with them on a blank canvas!

Need more explanation?
Because brush size is in pixels, I changed my Ruler to pixels so it was a bit easier to think about the relative size - a 12 x 12 inch canvas is 3600 x 3600pixels. You can use trial and error to find a good square brush size but knowing I'll have a border or about 150 pixels each side of the page, leaves me with about 3300 x 3300 pixels to fill. Zooming in to the top corner of my canvas, I drag a guide from the ruler to give me that 150pixel invisible border (make sure guides are on by going to View > Guides or clicking Ctrl - you can also type in specific guides by going View > New Guide and typing in 150px and 3450px for both horizontal and vertical )

Now just thinking before I 'brush' - If I used a 300pixel square brush, I could have rows and columns of 11 squares but I need an obvious space between my squares to give it that tiled mosaic look so I'm going to try using a size: 280px brush and space them at 120% - the distance and size is modifiable and up to personal preference of course. (Because the biggest square brush in that set is 24pixels, it will look a bit hazy at the edges at first because we scaled it up so much beyond it's 'sample size' but we'll fix that in a later step)

If the Brush palette isn't active, hit the 'B' key

So holding 'Shift', this is the nice clean-spaced mosaic tile row I get (the black squares). To get it to look more perfectly imperfect, handcut paper tile look, I adjusted the Brush Shape Dynamics & still holding Shift, you can see the difference in the wonky angled placement of the blue squares

 

Either of those is fine for a mosaic squares but I kept moving the Shape Dynamics a bit more & it gaves me a few rectangles which I like and after putting in some extra guides,and this time not holding the shift key, it also gives me a 'perfectly imperfect' look I like so for the next steps I'll use the 'lightest blue, no shift' row brush details .


A closer look at the Brush Palette numbers

So now I know what settings I want for my square brush to give the size, spacing and angles I liked, I'm starting with a new canvas
To keep my guides, I'm just going to Go to Image > Duplicate to copy my whole page so far with the guides and then delete what i'm not using (i may want to come back to my clean black row for a different page - just make sure you 'Save As' different names).


Got some color variation to the squares and now we fill up the page

 

This is optional but if your squares have fuzzy edges when you zoom in, this is how

(Using Refine Edge is my preferred way if you have that menu option)


Ta-da! fixed!

You can make a pretty cool mosaic with just one paper!

Works with any paper really

 

If you want to use a few different papers to make your mosaic background, the next steps set that up for you.

 

This was used for a Slow Scrap in Dec, so if you want to see my example layout & the thread discussion & pages made by other talented TLP community peeps, check out the original thread https://the-lilypad.com/forum/threads/closed-slow-technique-scrap-14-dec-7pm-est.80863/