fauxsaics
DESIGNER NICK MISANI CREATES TILED
ARTWORKS WITH A DIFFERENCE.It all started with some childhood doodling. While most of us
were busy sketching wonky bubble letters and those pointy
‘Stussy S’s in our school diaries, Nick Misani went for something
a bit zhuzhier. “My mum still has letters I wrote when I was little
that are full of drop caps, fancy borders and unrestrained use of
curls,” the Milan native says.
That fascination with ornamental lettering never went away
and, many years later, Nick found himself working alongside
renowned Italian-American typographer Louise Fili in New York.
Under her expert tutelage, Nick honed his strokes, swashes and
knowledge of historical typefaces, including tiled mosaics – then
he stumbled across an Instagram competition asking entrants to
“letter where they live”.“I created the first ‘fauxsaic’ – a digital, typographic mosaic – on
a whim, though the technique had been developing naturally for
months without me realising,” Nick explains. “Working with Louise
Fili, I had the pleasure of looking at photographs of gorgeous mosaics
every day. I spent many hours digitally restoring them and often had
to recreate missing or obscured areas.” Mosaics were the perfect
convergence of his three main fields of interest – typography,
interior design and decorative arts – so Nick took his competition
entry and ran with it.
Four months and 16 illustrations in, Nick believes he’s digitally
placed around a quarter of a million tiles in his travel-inspired
Fauxsaicseries. Each piece is constructed online using programs
like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop – but, similar to traditional
mosaics, he uses techniques like digital ‘grouting’ and individual tile
colouring to give them a realistic feel. “They each have to be created
with a sensitivity to the methodology used to cut tiles in real life,” he
says. “For example, smooth curved lines are difficult to create when
cutting stone, so most tiles in real mosaics have squared-off sides,
even if they form a curve.” The painstaking accuracy of his work
makes the process a slow one, with a fauxsaic taking anywhere
between 12 and 24-plus hours to design.
Each place name in the series represents somewhere Nick has
personally visited, as he prefers to imbue his pieces with the vibe
of the city. The San Diego illustration is bright, bold and features
cactus flowers in the background, for instance – meanwhile, the
Boston mosaic sticks to a classic black and white palette, which
Nick sees as being more appropriate for the historic city.
Asked if he would ever attempt a real-life, handmade mosaic, Nick
remains hopeful, if a little overwhelmed. “I love the physicality of the
process and the permanence of the outcome, and I’m so familiar
with the different tiling patterns at this point that I’m dying to jump
in and do it for real. That said, I’m intimidated by how laborious,
costly and time-intensive mosaics are. My fauxsaics take a long
time to make, but that’s nothing compared to the real deal.”look what i made