Art and Design A comprehensive guide for creative artists - Aaltodoc

Apart from that, excess glue can be cleaned with a
dampened paper.
Finish and preserve the collage artwork by varnishing it.
Varnish is widely used finish decoupage, but you can also
use lacquered sap. It is obtained from a lacquer-tree and it is
used for varnishing wood or other materials.
If lacquer dries well—on a surface, it forms a hard protective
coating necessary for finishing and embellishment of such
types of collage artworks.
At the final stage, find a safe place to keep and dry the
collage artwork. Depending on the nature of material used,
the collage artwork can also be sealed or laminated, if
necessary.
Exercise
1. Make a pictorial composition of a collage artwork using
found objects to educate your community about one
theme from the provided list below:
• The need for planting trees
• Global warming awareness
• Pollution of the environment
• The importance of recycling
• Sickness and disease through HIV-AIDS pandemic.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mosaic
A mosaic is a type of artwork that can be made by arranging
small coloured pieces of hard materials like glass, stone and
tiles to create a beautiful decorative pattern.
The History of mosaic art (2008) tells us that “mosaic history
goes back some 4,000 years or more, with the use of
terracotta cones pushed point-first into a background to
give decorations.” From this we can understand that any
hard surface can provide a base for a mosaic artwork so
long as it is firm, free from moisture and grease or liquids.
According to Tinkler (1911) “by the eighth century (Before
Christ), there were pebble pavements with different
unstructured decorations of coloured stones used for
creating patterns by the Greeks.” These mosaic artworks
were used for various purposes like making elaborate
decorations in worship places especially churches, surfacing
roads, house floor, walls, decorative utensils and furniture.
Other creative artists who do mosaic use recycled materials
from broken coloured pieces of terracotta carefully selected
from earthenware of a kind like glass, pottery as well as tiles.
Mosaic artworks are created in different ways, some display
shapes of precise geometric patterns, while other are
arranged almost randomly to display or show scenes of
people and animals. In other words, there is no right or
wrong choice for making mosaics artworks.
A further look at mosaic practices from Kyeyune's (2003, 129)
explanation about Todd's theories in practice offers “Todd’s
best-known work in Uganda is a mosaic mural exchange and
barter. In this work we discover that Todd was unambiguous
in the way he considered and incorporated artefacts of the
past in his design ... exchange and Barter was a public art
project carried out in mosaic and terrazzo on a new building
in the centre of Kampala to enliven urban scenes and give a
visual interest to a blank wall.
The theme of this 84-foot decoration is a pictorial history
of money, showing money and barter tokens, currencies
in current use and those that have been used throughout
history in many parts of the world ... Todd’s exploration of
these motifs is simple and direct.
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