This sweet kitchen mosaic backsplash was custom glass mosaic backsplash was for a kitchen remodel in Walnut Creek, CA. Colorful mosaic birds, roses and leaves, against an iridescent pink white background – bringing the magical touch of a garden into this kitchen.
I love to design from forms in nature and this was a lovely project to engage with from a design perspective. Here is the mosaic backsplash in-situ installed.
The inspiration for this mosaic came from her favorite colors, her love of roses, and a gorgeous fabric whose design she treasured. I developed the elements of the fabric design into a mosaic design so that there were discrete pieces of each design element that could be translated to glass. Here is the original inspiration for the design, on the right of this image is the fabric the client said she adored, and the color scheme that brought her joy. In the top right are my sketches of birds and rose vines in bloom inspired by her original idea. The mosaic in progress on the left.
An example of Appliqué Mosaic Andamento is the birds in this design – each part of the bird or subpart is composed of one discrete piece of glass shaped exactly as the element it’s meant to represent. so the beak is made of one piece of glass shaped like a beak. The wing is made of of individual and tiny perfectly shaped pieces of glass shaped like feathers. This way of piecing mosaic is called appliqué technique which borrows its name from the quilting technique of the same name.
More mosaic appliqué applications! The roses were also designed so that each petal was cut as a whole piece of glass and so the roses were not made up of broken random shaped glass. Similarly for the rose vine leaves – they are also done with appliqué mosaic technique but this time with two halves of each leaf cut exactly to the shape it represents so that the grout line left between the pieces becomes the central veining of the leaves. This is a very time consuming way to make mosaic but it provides a unique elegance to the andamento.
The background of the mosaic backsplash was pieced with iridescent white glass. Each piece ends up with a slightly different angle to the light so the viewer sees a subtle iridescence scattered throughout the mosaic backsplash. The iridescent glass adds a gentle pink warmth to the whole piece which brightens the mood and is a joy to the eye.
