Mistakes – When to correct
At some point you make mistakes. You need to know when to correct them and when you leave them and move on.
A Roman mosaic floor is set following certain rules in a way which avoids any point of focus, a discordant area which disrupts the flow of the mosaic. Once you notice an area like this then every time you walk into the room you eye is automatically drawn to this point.
For this piece I’m going to look at channelling, this is where the tesserae (mosaic tiles) are laid slightly off set from the previous row. The images of my own pieces specifically made to illustrate this show what this looks like and how it should be.
Incorrect Correct
In my experience this is something that takes you about 3 tesserae before you notice it. You wouldn’t go back and remove any of the tesserae you’d just carry on making sure the next tesserae is either larger or smaller than the others to break up the line.
If you look at the example from the background of a mosaic dated to 3rd century AD you’ll see where this has happened.
As you can see it makes no real difference to the overall effect, they don’t create any points of focus and the tesserae are offset again fairly quickly.
