Picture frames, they’re really a lot of fun to make and that’s what we’re going to be doing now. What you're going to need for this project is the following, you need to have some pieces of paper a little mosaic pieces, they actually you can buy them in an art store they come in a bag like this you can use them for lots and lots of project that last you a really long time. You can make pictures out of them, decorate boxes and we’re going to actually use them to decorate a picture frame. And then we’ll put a photo inside that picture frame.

You’re going to need some brushes, a place to work and you're going to need some polymer medium, okay or oftentimes it’s called gloss medium. This is one of my favorite materials to work with because it doubles as a glue and as a varnish. Okay, and a varnish is basically a clear coating that makes things, it protects them and it can make things even look very glossy. Or you can also get matt varnishes and it will make them have a matte surface on them.

Couple of things you need to know about polymer, one is they can totally destroy your paint brushes so you have to make certain that at the very end you’ve got to wash your paint brushes out really well. It dries fairly quickly and it puts a great finish on anything that you use it on.

So what I’m going to do is go ahead and open up one of these picture frames. This I bought at the art store, you can buy it in frame shops already made or if you’re very industrious take a piece of cardboard or tag board and with your ruler and a pencil, go ahead and measure out a little picture frame. And then use a scissors or an X-acto Knife to cut it out.

So, they come in all different sizes they have small sizes here, medium size with the size that I used to complete this one, this size. So now, like any other art project you need to decide on a color scheme, we got lots of choices here, this little mosaic pieces are kind of fun because they’re double sided. They’ve got two different colors like on the back of the violet is the yellow and on the back of the blue is the orange the red and green so actually, it’s kind of neat art lesson because the red and green are complimentary colors. The orange and blue are complementary colors and the violet and yellow are complimentary colors.

So there you’ve got a little color wheel education going on there. Okay, I’ve been pulling out a bunch of pieces here and I think I’ve got enough to get it started and you need to know that there is a lot of things you can do with this mosaic pieces. Other than the picture frame you could make an entire you know picture out of them, you could maybe take an empty can that maybe mom you know used for dinner. You know take that empty can and cover it with some paper and then glue mosaics around that and you could make your self a nice little pencil can or anything you could put erasers in there. You could keep anything you wanted in the can.

So just know that there are other things that you can make besides a picture frame. The other thing is if you can’t find this little already cut up, you know, colored pieces you can always takes craps of construction paper and just cut your little squares yourself they don’t have to be necessarily the same size. They can be different sizes because if you’ve ever looked at mosaic work often times the mosaic pieces are all different sizes. So you know, you don’t have to necessarily find this. So I’m going to go ahead and get started and I’m going to put my polymer over here and keep my pieces out here and what you want to do is just start by putting some polymer medium down on the picture frame.

Because you always want to have polymer underneath where you're putting down a piece of mosaic and then you're going to paint on top of it. Okay, so first thing I want to do is just kind of do a little border all the way around the outside. And there’s a real easy way to pick this up, you just pick them up with you're paint brush, the tip of your brush because it’s going to have some polymer on it and they’re going to stick right to your paint brush. And then you just set them down. Make sure you leave a little space between them so that—so it looks like the grout that you would put down on your mosaic.

And I’m going to lay a few of this down and when they're right here at a little bit better then you put a coat of polymer over the top of them. And you just continue to lift them up and set them in place. Fun thing about mosaic work is that it’s certainly not limited to picture frames. You could make an entire picture out of pieces, mosaic pieces. You could even take and empty like soup can and of course clean it out, cover it with some paper and then create a mosaic design on that and then you’d have yourself a nice pencil can to put on your desk.

Also if you don’t have access to these little precut pieces of colored paper you can always make your own mosaics. Take some construction paper cut them up into little pieces, they don’t have to be perfect squares, this aren’t even perfect squares. You’ll notice that some of them are a little bit bigger than other ones. And if you’ve ever looked at mosaic work all the pieces are all different sizes. So there is always ways to do these projects, even if you don’t have this—the exact same materials that I have.

Okay, now I got to find one that’s a little bit smaller here that will fit going to be right to edge. If it can’t fit on the other thing is got a pair of scissors just cut them to the size you want them and they’ll fit exactly where you need them to fit. Okay, got one last one here and then the rest of this should be dry enough to put you're code of polymer over the tops of this to hold them in place and put that glazy finish on them.

Now I have to start thinking about what kind of pattern I’m going to create on this picture frame with my different colors so what I might do is just kind of lay some tiles down in place and not actually glue them down until I’ve made some decisions. What kind of clay, see maybe what we can do is we go that in the corners with the blue. And it’s kind of interesting.

Now I’m noticing that I’m going to be able to get three rose on the top and bottom but that’s going to be a little tricky on the sides. So, let’s see what happens maybe if we cut, maybe if we cut this in half we will able to solve that problem. We will we go this way and we’re doing vertically, we’re doing something like this and make a pattern out of the mosaics.

We’re coming a goal cross here, with yellow ones it’s a good thing I had little half of one there to fill in and then I’m going to go across the top here with yellow ones. Okay, I think I have a plan, I think I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to put orange ones in the corner here. It’s always fun to do art projects because you never know what kinds of problems are going to pop up that you have to solve, I think right here, with that over.

I’m just going to scoop this all to my right and I will show you why, because I didn’t want that little one, the half one. I do want that two-line end up next to each other. See now we’ve got a little balanced there I think of those two little partial ones would have been right over each other when to look this nice.

Now I’ll finish the orange down here, I finish cutting up a whole bunch the little yellow tiles in half and now I’m going to go ahead and see how my little double patterns works here. Alternating, okay and I’m just going to go all the way down the side and it’s kind of neat because we’ve got a different pattern going on here which is a nice change so I will put down certainly different from this one where we stayed with all the same size tiles.

We got one, well two last ones to put in. All right, we’re finished up here and I'm going to set this down and I’m going to take a favorite photo and some masking tape. And of course you want to do this after it’s dry, so that you don’t get any marks in your polymer but I think I can do this carefully. I need to line it up behind there, take the same of those and then move it up here. I’m sure you have some favorite photos at home that you would love to decorate your home picture for. Have fun.