Level 2 – Dynamic Andamento teaches you structured ways to introduce more movement, volume and energy into your work through sdoppiamento (line splitting), accentuating curves, flaring and scaling your tesserae, and using contour to create volume in your mosaics.

Working in predominantly one colour, this level poses some technical challenges.

The tasks encourage students to tackle their andamento skills without the comfort of colour.

Colour is often used without knowledge or consideration of its elements and commonly overdone to hide the fact that the andamento doesn’t actually work.

A true ‘Andamento Boot Camp’, this level has been described as tricky, but in many ways it’s just as foundational to mosaic expression as Level 1.​

Unit 1: Introduces Basic Sdoppiamento. This is one of the MOST important skills a mosaicist needs in their bag of tricks!

Some students may have heard of the term, and others may be thinking what on earth is that!!!?

This technique sits within the Classical tradition and in essence it refers to doubling or splitting your line in a fluid way, growing seamlessly from one line into two, two lines into three or more and back again.

This allows you to express fluidly, describing form and building movement in your subject matter and backgrounds.

In Unit 2 we start to move away from a Classical way of working by creating Flared Sdoppiamento.

This technique creates lines that are more energetic and have a bursting dynamism.

I introduce the five sided piece, the ‘irregular pentagon’ which is a critical shape to employ where lines divide in rapid succession.

It is an essential shape to have in your tesserae toolbox – knowing when and how to use it (and when not to) is an important step.

In Unit 3 we introduce the contemporary technique of scaling.

In classical mosaic we see different sized tesserae in different areas of the design – perhaps we see the tiny tesserae of Opus Vermiculatum in the emblema, we see mid sized tesserae in the background field and some larger tesserae in the border.

So, different areas of the mosaic may have different patterns rendered in different sized pieces.

We notice in Classical mosaic that when lines widen and divide, the tesserae soon return to the original size, creating a seamless growth.

In contemporary practice this is not always the case, and we can deliberately manipulate the scale of tesserae throughout a line to help create lightness, heaviness, fullness or delicacy.

In Unit 4 we push scaling a little bit further, moving from the creation of a two dimensional depiction of scale to implying three dimensions.

This is possibly the hardest of the five units as we build understanding of volume through the use of compression and expansion in the tesserae.

The final lesson of Level 2 reflects a real world application of the techniques learnt in the previous units in which skills were investigated explicitly.

But like Level 1, we see that in real life mosaic, these techniques are not used in isolation and instead are all used in subtle ways, here and there within a design.

Unit five demonstrates how these can be integrated in an image with subtle but explicit use of the techniques learnt in the previous units.

 Once you complete these units, you will be soundly equipped with the andamento skills to tackle almost anything.

So let’s get started on Dynamic Andamento.. andamento boot camp!