Ancient Art Meets Modern Technology and Some First World Problems.

Mosaic courtyard from Uruk, Mesopotamia, 3000 BC

 A Photo-journal Entry on the commencement of work on the mosaic.

Mosaic is an ancient art form, and we have surviving examples of it dating to 3000 years BC. In other words, you are a thousand years closer in time to the Birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ, than the Incarnate Christ was to the earliest mosaics which we can still see today. Think about that. The period of time between the oldest surviving mosaics to the time of Christ is 3000 years. The period of time between the Birth of Christ to where you are now is 2000 years.



This ancient art form has continued to our time today. After the birth of Christ, it was adopted and sanctified by the Church in the depiction of Christ, the Saints, and the symbols of the Christian Faith. Today we are working on turning a painted icon of St. Demetrios measuring 0.3m x 0.425m into a mosaic measuring 1m x 2.5m.  To do this, we need an enlarged copy of the icon on one sheet of sturdy paper the size of our planned mosaic which will form the pattern on which we will build the mosaic.

How to do this enlargement? This is where modern technology meets ancient art. We decided to use the ingenuous method employed in most modern kindergartens of tracing a projected image to produce a mural for children to paint! 
So, we just needed two things: a blank section of flat wall as large as our mosaic and a computer projector placed at an adequate distance from the wall to project a large enough image of our Icon to fill the section of wall. So the hunt was on for a space which met these criteria. Unfortunately, experimentation showed that the projector had to be at least five metres from the screen to produce a large enough image of the icon, and the studio is only 3.5m long. So the hunt for the ideal section of wall to act as screen shifted to the house. After much surveying of rooms, unfortunately, the only section of wall large enough to act as a screen at this distance was the section of wall which was at floor level under the dining area window, which was behind a clothes airer, which was behind the dining table, which was behind a sofa which was behind a coffee table which was behind another sofa which sat over the section of floor where the projector had to sit in order to project the image onto the wall.

There was only one thing for it. All the furniture had to go:

 

We then placed a borrowed projector at one end of the room connected to a laptop with an image of  our icon:

And projected the image onto the "ideal" wall section:

 

 All this furniture moving took us through to morning tea time. As you can see, a poor iconographer can only afford generic instant coffee, generic Tim Tams and condensed milk for morning tea:

The next step was to tape a large piece of art paper to our screen, project the image onto it, and trace it with pencil:

Using this method, we had to be sure that we were indeed tracing the projection of the icon and not something else!

In the end, we had a feint tracing which we could then add details to: