During October 2012 I travelled to Maui for a mural making residency. Click here to learn more about the mural and the story behind it. 

As a requirement of the residency, I had to create 6 workshops that would feed into the mural work. The workshops involved painting for teens, mosaic making for adults, and professional development courses for teachers. 

The mosaic class worked on the actual pieces on the mural itself. The demigod Maui is flanked by the sun and the moon. In Hawaiian mythology Maui used a rope to capture the sun to lengthen the day. 

When the actual sun travels over the West Maui mountains, the fragments cut in mirror glimmer and become more pronounced, revealing the moon's crescent and the sun's rays.

Much time was spent in the mural's design making sure the flowers I included were indigenous to the island. Luckily there was an expert on hand at the Hui who led me in the right direction. 

The design was projected, traced onto cloth, and labelled for different shades and colors of glass. 

Drawing detail.

Many of the people who took the class were established glass artists on the island. Nena and Dona, are members (Dona is the President) of the Maui stained glass artist's association. They were pros, and looking forward to collaborating.

Glass in progress

Due to our time restraints, everyone stuck to a particular section of flowers to work on and call their own. Some in the group worked on their own smaller pieces as practice for the larger work. 

Class portrait. We had to improvise with 5 gallon buckets under the tables to save our backs. 

The sun and moon get taped up.

The glass pieces are set into cement board, and once again artist Billy Welker lends a hand clearing the thin set  from our grout lines. 

After an intense one day installation of 24 cloth panels, the glass pieces get installed and grouted. 

A shot of the attendees of my professional development class titled "Murals by the Masses". The class focused on use of the Photoshop and TilePile programs for mural making in the classroom. 

I introduced the class to TilePile as a way to create large photo real mosaics in the classroom. We created a small sample of a turtle head. 

We created the piece using 4 workstations, during the second day of our class. 

TilePile breaks an imported image down to a set palette of  tile colors. I tend to use Trend and Lopio vitreous glass tiles. 

TilePile highlights where particular colors appear for you, and the tiles are placed accordingly. This works best on large tilted computer screens where you can rest the tray on top. 

As the tile trays were filled in, the sections were secured with clear tape and labelled. 

The finished Honu!

The finished mosaic was affixed to cement board that afternoon. 

Installation detail

Installation Detail

 Josephine, one of the students found a home for the finished piece. I'm looking forward to seeing the work in place! 

For more info view the Murals section of this site, and click here to view the residency website I designed.