I’ve thought about making a paper mosaic a number of times. With the leftovers of the cards I cut up this week for some of the previous projects on OFC (Christmas Card Door Hanger, Pyramidal Christmas Trees, Woven Ornaments, 20-sided Sphere Ornaments), now seemed like a good time to tackle it. This turned out to be a time-consuming project, so I’m going to split it into two posts.

A paper mosaic is just like a tile mosaic, except with paper. First of all you are going to need paper tiles, so any interesting section of a Christmas card that you have left over from another project is a good candidate. You can use scissors, but I used a large, almost square, punch (actually an isosceles trapezoid punch). As you can see, these cards had plenty of excitement left in them after having used them to make the 20-sided Sphere Ornament:

After you’ve punched a lot of paper tiles, prepare a surface to receive them. I mixed some old bright green acrylic with black gesso and used a sponge brush to coat a piece of illustration board. Wait! The choice of illustration board was a MISTAKE! More about that later.

Now with lots of tiles and a surface to put them on, I began to arrange them, play with them and move them around on the illustration board:

As you can see, this can be a lot of fun. Continued here . . .

Merry Christmas!