Skills and Practices related to the Craft of Mosaic

Working on a mosaic panelMosaics is a type of art in which a decoration of a surface made up of closely set, usually variously colored, small pieces of material such as stone, mineral, glass, tile or shell. Pieces are applied onto a surface that has been prepared with an adhesive. Designs and images representing religious, civilized values are designed by mosaics.
Small cubes are rendered very carefully to create a real piece of art representing natural scenes, geometric designs, images of people and animals.
In order to produce mosaics, different types of granite stones with different colors including white, yellow, pink, grey are brought from Petra and the Dead Sea. If artists need other colors, they bring artificial ceramic colors like green, blue and phosphoric. New types of saws have been invented to cut the stone through bringing stone inside the saw with the help of water. These saws cut stones using different measurements depending on the type of the paintings. Today many instruments are invented to get more professional work.
Making Mosaic Pieces:
Mosaics on the rough side of the stones: Stones are cut in different shapes and the tweezer is used to catch the stone from the rough side. An adhesive made of water and flour is used. where the required painting had already been drawn on a piece of cloth stretched on wooden board. Then they put stones on the board using tweezers. A frame either circular or square is made for the paintings. A paste made of soft cement and sand is applied inside the frame. The rough side of the stone is applied onto the paste so the soft side of the stone is on the top. Then the painting is washed with warm water to remove the flour and the piece of cloth.
Mosaics on the soft side of the stone: In this case the size of the stone is bigger and we put the stone on a ready -made nylon mesh using superglue. This is a flexible kind that can be folded or bent and used for carpets and floors.
Madaba city is very famous for the production of mosaics and because of the many mosaic paintings recovered there. It won the title of World Craft City in 2016 for mosaic art, and joined the Creative Cities Network in 2017 for the handicrafts mosaic category.