Niki de Saint Phalle inspired mosaics

This month we are highlighting women artists for Women’s History Month and this project is inspired by Niki de Saint Phalle, a French - American artist who was born in 1930 in France. She created bold, bright works of art - including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and even playgrounds. Though she created all different kinds of art, a lot of her sculptures were huge, monumental in size, which was uncommon for a female artist during her time. A lot of her large scale sculptures were covered in beautiful mosaics, or small pieces of colored glass, to create beautiful bright designs.

Though we couldn’t create a monumental artwork like Niki, we did feel inspired by here mosaic designs and thought we would create our own.

For this project we used:

- small piece of cardboard

- paint

- air drying clay

- beads

- buttons

First we grabbed a small piece of cardboard and painted it so we had a colorful base to work on. Then we created shapes with the clay - I recreated one of Niki’s most recurring designs, a curvy goddess, while my daughters wanted to do a cat and butterfly. Next we pressed beads and buttons into the clay to create mosaics.

This was a simple project that kept us feeling inspired for quite awhile as we played with the clay and experimented with different designs using the beads and buttons.