Finessing the grout

It's no surprise that I am never satisfied with a single color of grout, but I find that I nearly always want more subtlety in the grout changes and shades of a single color after I get close to being done with it.

So what's a girl to do? I have developed a number of techniques that help me do what I call "finessing the grout".

Here's a little taste of what that involves.

This is a small piece (5" x 7") that relies heavily on the grout changes, because the size of the piece prevents me from getting a lot of gradual color changes in the glass pieces. As small as the glass tesserae are, they are not all that small in relation to the overall size of the piece.

Because of the center being grouted in shades darker than the background, as soon as the pears and leaves were done, I grouted them. Then I applied the background. At this point I decided to adjust the shading on the pears before grouting the background. There are several ways to do this. One is to use a wash of acrylic paint onto the areas you want to shade. However, because the grout had been curing for several days, I know from experience that an acrylic wash will turn out looking grainy if applied now. When the grout is fresh you can use that technique (within reason) and the paint pigments seem to soak in and stay put better. My best option was to mix up another shade of grout and go over the parts I wanted shaded. Before I could do that, I needed to remove a small amount of the grout from the area to give some room for the new grout to settle into. Grout, after all, is a space filler and NOT an adhesive.

I then mixed up the grout shade I wanted, and instead of applying it with my regular tool, I used a very small stiff brush. This not only gives me more control, it allows me to fade out the changes nicely.

Blurry pic, sorry.

I used the brush to scrub the grout in there and then wiped the area with a paper towel.

Sometimes, there will still be an area that needs a fine line to delineate areas, and in this case, it was between the pears. I used thinned acrylic paint applied with a very fine liner brush. Again, this was an option because it was applied on top of fresh grout.

Then onto the background, which is two colors - plain white and a pale blue, applied quickly so it could be blended together while wet. And that's how we get to the picture at the top!