What I would have liked to have known from the start.

I had a moment of clarity a while back. I realized that making a mosaic isn't about filling the space - it is about using the space. If I was just filling the space it wouldn't matter how I put the tiles down, the shape of the tile or the orientation. I'd just slap something down and move on to the next tile in the pile. One of the things that it took me time and a number of mosaics to learn is that of course these things matter. The tiles can suggest movement, and structure, and emotion, if the time is taken to ensure that the right tile for the space is chosen / created. Looking at the peddlers hat, taken from my Barrow Boy, Hanoi mosaic, the tiles were placed to suggest the downward flow of the typical Vietnamese head covering - I could have filled that space a lot more quickly with some random triangles, but it wouldn't have looked the same. It wouldn't have felt the same.