Butterfly Project: (4) Grout day

August 31, 2011

Today was grout day number four.

It was a cloudy day and cooler than usual but still terribly humid. I cannot wait until the winter season rolls around and takes all the humid weather with it!

Grouting the mosaics

I grouted the big happy alligator first. Grouting is a cinch when you are doing a large mosaic that is completely flat. It's the small, detailed butterflies that take a lot of time.

Then I grouted my son's Dragon-fly and a small butterfly that I added to the cloud last week.

After I got the work done on the main wall, I moved over to one of the side walls and finished things up there.


© 2011

Kristi and Kathryn Reimer

I grouted two of the mosaic butterflies using a light gray grout.

Dark grout sometimes breaks apart a design rather than making it more cohesive. Artist Annette Simpson's George Washington butterfly had to be grouted with something lighter than black or the majority of the detail would have been lost.

It is grouted in the photo below...

I also used light grout on Daisy Rattray's Smiley Butterfly because the flesh colored glass would have been washed out by the black grout.

Grouting 150+ butterflies has taught me a thing or two about how important grout color can be to a design.

Typically when I am grouting any of my artwork I use only two colors...black and light gray. The light gray can be "dyed" with acrylic paints to change the color and black seems to make my Day of the Dead art look more striking.

I'm halfway through the Butterfly Project installation and it has become obvious that darker glass colors (like black, browns, dark blues and greens) should not be paired with black grout unless there is a brighter glass color in the design to balance the heaviness of the black grout.

Last week I grouted artist Chris Emmert's butterfly with black grout. The dark grout caused the fringed edges of her butterfly to disappear, so I regrouted with a light gray today and it made a significant difference.

See the before and after pics:

Grout color is important!

On the agenda

If the weather holds up I'll be back at the center tomorrow or Friday to finish up the last two walls. There are about 30 more butterflies still left to grout!

Press about the Project

A crew from Wink News was at the Calusa Nature Center yesterday interviewing the staff about the center's programs and air conditioners that were replaced after a recent theft. Staff member Melinda Russek plugged the Butterfly Project while the crew was touring the facility!

Animal pics!

The center's two bald eagles...(terribly hard to photograph through the fencing!)

A cute little fox named Tails...

The escape artist skunk named Webster...snoozing...

Webster the skunk and Buffalo Bill share an enclosure, sort of. The tortoise pen is a large fenced in area and the skunk enclosure sits inside the pen.

Maybe Webster continues to attempt to escape his enclosure because he sees Buffalo Bill roaming "free"?

Here they are together...