Public Art Mosaic Process in Ithaca

Mosaic Planning
This weekend 3 Ithaca art teachers, the Fine Arts Booster Group president and I got together and transferred the design (an areal view of the inlet of Cayuga Lake) onto drywall. The drywall will be passed out to all the art teachers at all the schools in the district. They will all have "different pieces of the puzzle". Using their drywall forms they will create .5" slabs in the exact shape they are given. Their students will push stamps and various tools for making impressions into the wet clay. The teachers will then divide these textured slabs into tiles of a certain range in size and bisque fire them when they are dry. (The drywall is meant to help in the drying process.)
Here are some pictures of us with the paper template taped down to the drywall slabs (which have been cut to the size of the panels that will support the final work +8% to allow for the shrinkage of the clay when fired) cutting along the lines with utility knives. There will be a total of 20 panels and we could fit 5 panels at a time on our tables, so we did it in 4 batches. Gary & Sarah (from the Alternatives Community School and Belle Sherman respectively) decided to work on the cutting of the drywall outside, while Jocelyn Lutter Carver, whose room we were using at the high school, and I finished up transferring the design.
It took about 2 hours to complete the process, and then we sat down for a snack and to discuss the stain sample that I had done. We agreed that we like seeing the variety rather than settling on one technique or surface that we would want to see all over.
This will be an almost 60' long piece (by 4.5' tall) and we want to keep it interesting.