Mosaic Guitar

A couple of years ago, I blogged about the old dulcimer that I mosaiced (is that a word?), and I'm finally getting around to doing a guitar. Doing mosaics isn't hard. I don't make diagrams or elaborate tile plans, but I experiment with placement as I go. Also, you have to not mind cut, raw fingers and a dirty workspace. Here's the dulcimer:

It's hard to get great pics of shiny objects. I tried taking them outside and shooting without a flash. It worked fairly well. I looked for an old guitar, but the ones I found were considered vintage or something and were expensive, so I bought a beginner guitar on Amazon.com for fairly cheap. It had a beautiful finish, and I hated to sand it down, but anything in the name of art.

So, I began gluing tiles using Weldbond glue. It doesn't have a noxious odor (no migraine), it's workable for several minutes so I can change my mind, and when it dries, it's clear and extremely strong. You can see my pencil lines where I experimented with tile placement.

I glued clear, rounded stones inside because the hole in a guitar is so big. (I forgot to take pics of the back, and I'm too lazy to go do it now, but I covered it with irregular pink and teal stones that look like stones in the bottom of a river to me.)

Here's the dirty part. I've learned to spend more time on grouting so that I don't have such a mess to clean up when it's dry. I hate chiseling my pretty stones out of the concrete. This grout job took about 5 hours, but it was worth it because there was almost no cleanup the next day.

I like the way it turned out, but of course on any art project you can always think of how you might do it differently next time. Jim and I cut the tiles from sheets of stained glass and an old mirror.

Marley is usually so good while I paint, mosaic, or whatever, and he lies on my worktable, but in the making of this piece, he decided to eat glass tiles, so he lost his exulted position, poor li'l guy. I can't have him eating glass, though.

Jim made hangers for both pieces. We're a great team; I come up with the ideas, and he can make anything. Sorry ladies, he's taken. They're hung farther apart than I'd like, but they are so heavy that the hangers had to be screwed into studs.
Thanks for stopping by. I've been doing lots of other stuff, like writing a novel and planting a straw bale garden. More on those later.
Cat, Marley & Jim