MOULTRIE — Karen Sasine sees the world in terms of geometrically shapes that she can fit together piece by piece into a mosaic work of art.

“I’m passionate about it. I can’t get enough of it. I can spend hours upon hours upon hours a day doing this,” she said.

Sasine said creating mosaics is like putting a puzzle together except that she is creating the puzzle pieces as she goes. She said it takes patience and she feels like she gets “into a zone” when she is working.

“When a piece fits, it tells you,” she said as she cut one of the pieces of Smalti glass.

“Glass is such a wonderful product that people don’t know enough about. It’s a natural product and I love it,” she said.

She also said, laughing, that Band-Aids are a staple in her studio and she does cut herself all the time.

She has been creating mosaics for four years, although she said she has been an artist “forever.” She got started by just taking a workshop. In the past four years, she has immersed herself in the craft, creating a studio in back of her home.

“I think mosaics fit my personality,” she said.

She also said it allows her to be creative in so many different ways and still stay within in her craft.

“Mosaics are very personal. It’s almost a spiritual process,” she said.

Sasine belongs to a group called mosaicartists.org, which includes about 4,000 artists internationally, and she said she consults the masters online with every piece that she does.

“The Internet has brought the community closer together,” she said.

She won a trip to attend a two-week Orsoni Mosaic Master Class in Venice, Italy, at last year’s Society of American Mosaic Artists (SAMA) conference and she said this was the most intense training she has gotten.

The two-week master class was focused on the honing of her craft from sunup to sundown that featured instruction from Italian mosaic masters. While there, she said she worked only with the Orsoni Smalti, which was the type of glass used to create the mosaics in Byzantine churches in Italy.

“When I first got to Italy, I walked into a church in Ravenna and it brought me to tears,” she said.