Glass wall tile wonderful glass mosaic tile art is easy! Let me show you how.
Ever wonder what glass actually is? Do we cut it or break it (is there a difference)? Why and how does scoring a line allow us to control the way glass breaks? To fully understand why we cut glass the way we do, we should first understand a bit about glass itself.
There are two types of solids: amorphous and crystalline. (Huh? Amorphous? Wasn’t he a character in the movie series The Matrix? No, that was Morpheus.) As you’ll learn in my eBook in the chapter on Tessera Types, glass is an amorphous solid (the chapter explains what glass is to help the mosaic artist understand how to make better cuts and breaks, and to help reduce wasted glass). An amorphous solid, such as glass and plastic, has molecules arranged randomly in no particular pattern. On the contrary, a crystalline solid has molecules arranged in fixed patterns, sometimes called lattices. Most solids are crystalline, such as metal, ice, and diamonds.
Glass can break in a controlled manner (e.g., along its score line) because it doesn’t have a specific molecular structure. For example, a diamond breaks cleanly along its fixed molecular structure or cleavage (more commonly understood as “grain”). If you don’t properly align your breaking tool along the grain, the diamond can shatter. However, because glass doesn’t have a grain, you can break it in any direction without it shattering. The question is how do we get it to break the way we want?
Ever wonder what glass actually is? Do we cut it or break it (is there a difference)? Why and how does scoring a line allow us to control the way glass breaks? To fully understand why we cut glass the way we do, we should first understand a bit about glass itself.
There are two types of solids: amorphous and crystalline. (Huh? Amorphous? Wasn’t he a character in the movie series The Matrix? No, that was Morpheus.) As you’ll learn in my eBook in the chapter on Tessera Types, glass is an amorphous solid (the chapter explains what glass is to help the mosaic artist understand how to make better cuts and breaks, and to help reduce wasted glass). An amorphous solid, such as glass and plastic, has molecules arranged randomly in no particular pattern. On the contrary, a crystalline solid has molecules arranged in fixed patterns, sometimes called lattices. Most solids are crystalline, such as metal, ice, and diamonds.
Glass can break in a controlled manner (e.g., along its score line) because it doesn’t have a specific molecular structure. For example, a diamond breaks cleanly along its fixed molecular structure or cleavage (more commonly understood as “grain”). If you don’t properly align your breaking tool along the grain, the diamond can shatter. However, because glass doesn’t have a grain, you can break it in any direction without it shattering. The question is how do we get it to break the way we want?
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