The panel
A clear base with the tesserae on top. 3 mm base plus 3 mm pieces is 6 mm, which is where fused glass wants to settle.
The design
The tesserae
The gap is the clear base showing through. It closes up as the glass fuses, so a wider one keeps more of the base visible in the finished piece.
A few rows hugging the shape and a plain field behind is the usual arrangement. Inside rows stop on their own once the shape is too narrow to take another.
Color
Glass lines
Printing
Set the scale to 100% and turn off “fit to page”. Lay the tesserae straight onto the printed sheet.
Preview
What to cut
How this one works
A mosaic reads as a mosaic because the rows follow the subject. Lay a leaf on a square grid and it looks like a leaf drawn on graph paper; lay the rows around it and it looks made.
So the outline gets a coordinate system of its own — one direction along it, one away from it — and a tessera is a rectangle in that, mapped back onto the panel. The rows curve because of it, and the pieces taper on their own: the same step along the outline covers less ground on the inside of a bend than the outside. That taper is the thing you cannot get from a grid, and it is why some of these are nipper work rather than a score and a snap.
Rows filling the inside stop by themselves. Pushed far enough into a narrow shape, an inward row turns inside out — so each one is checked and dropped when it does, rather than drawn as a knot.