New Portrait - Reverse Engineered Substrate

For my latest portrait, I used a method I learned last year at the Mosaic School in Spilembergo Italy.  

My reference was an original drawing, I  did earlier this year for Julia Kay's Portrait Party,  in graphite, water soluble ink pencils, and a touch of white acrylic paint.   

I began by enlarging and printing the image onto six 8.5x11 sheets of paper.  The image was then covered by clear plastic, allowing me to see the image as I adhered my tesserae (pieces), with a polymer modified mortar, directly onto the plastic.

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My materials were a variety of colorful Italian & Mexican smalti, including some luscious large riven chunks which I love, dishes, and slate.

Once I finished laying all the tesserae, the real experimentation began.  Flipping the work & reverse engineering a hangable substrate.  Here's a time lapse of that process....

& Tada! 

​I wanted to go BIG, and this portrait is indeed, the largest mosaic portrait, of just a face, I've created to date.