“Make Your Mark” is an ongoing project with Alderwood Middle School in Lynnwood, Washington. This colourful public mosaic art piece will be composed of roughly 15,000 wooden tiles, many thousands of which have been decorated by students and staff with archival quality pens. These blocks will be rearranged by the artist to form a map of the world that will be a lasting impression of Alderwood Middle School in 2017.
Students and staff have contributed thousands of hand-illustrated tiles. I had a wonderful time sorting through the tiles and seeing their remarkable range of expression and personality.
“Make Your Mark”‘s map of the world will contain several large-scale “feature” images – tiles I found particularly striking and engaging whose images will be enlarged and embedded in the finished composition.
A close-up of other potential “feature” tiles. The tiles whose images will be enlarged are chosen with the finished composition of “Make Your Mark” in mind. There are simply too many tiles showing artistic merit for beauty to be my sole criterion in selecting “features”. Way to go Alderwood Middle School!
Once sorted, the tiles are placed in a grid matrix before they are digitally photographed. Later in the process, the grid will provide unique coordinates for every tile, making them easy to locate when I am building the mosaic.
A single sheet of tiles placed in a grid matrix. Once photographed, the tiles will be analyzed by a computational algorithm that will use them much like pixels to compose a larger image of my design.
A few thousand hand-illustrated tiles awaiting photography.
The students and staff of Alderwood Middle School put in a tremendous effort hand-illustrating thousands of wooden tiles. However, to fully realize “Make Your Mark”, I need a few thousand more. To that end, I have selected a few dozen images and made them into stamps! Using archival ink and leftover blank wooden tiles, these stamps will help to generate the tiles I need, while remaining faithful to the original intent of making a public mosaic art piece using the images produced by everyone at AMS.
