300+ Mosaic Tips, Techniques, Templates and Trade Secrets
*Starred Review* Home in on the last two words of artist-maven Fitzgerald’s title: Trade Secrets. That’s exactly what you’ll get when using this colorful, filled-to-the-brim reference for creating mosaics. The author spares no thought, no idea, no piece of advice, and it is all very well organized in five chapters: Essential Preparation, All about Tesserae, Researching and Planning Your Design, Working Methods, and Practical Applications. Icons helpfully define the type of counsel she offers: try it for substitutions; fix it for solutions (e.g., use olive oil on your hands after handling grout and other cement-based materials); and a jargon buster defines unusual words like adamento (i.e., the way it flows). Fitzgerald is also very pragmatic: charts show, in a glance, the pros and cons of adhesives, substrates, and tesserae, with a one to three ranking from easy to difficult, cheap to expensive. Ten projects (although usually crammed into two-page layouts) demonstrate different techniques; for instance, a flower shows how to use the direct-working project method, and a swimming fish shows tessellation. --Barbara Jacobs