For not quite 20 years, island artist Clare Dohna had a stall at the Pike Place Market where she sold her cast ceramic Victorian-style broaches. That all changed when she moved to Vashon in 1996 and began to create her own hand-crafted, colorful and whimsical tiles. When Pike Place Market celebrates its expansion with a grand opening tomorrow, Thursday, Dohna’s two artistic worlds will converge. The artist just completed tiling three large walls with her signature tiles along the newly-built market staircase.

When the Pike Place Historical commission issued a request for proposals in 2014 to artists to design artwork for the expansion, Dohna’s former market friends told her about the project and encouraged her to apply. She did just that and was selected to tile the “donor wall” — which recognizes donors who gave between $10,000 and $500,000 to help fund the market expansion — plus two more walls.

“I had to submit a proposal for what I wanted to do, and the historical commission had to approve it,” Dohna said. “They liked my three ideas of flowers and birds, vegetables and fish for the donor wall.”

Then came the hard part. Dohna had to handcraft each tile, arrange them on multiple 4- x 5-foot panels in her Vashon studio, transport them to the market, hang them on the walls and grout them in place — all in time for the grand opening.

“Three walls, three years and 33 days,” Dohna said, referring to the three years it took to create the design and tiles and the 33 days for installation.

The artist began the project by making a paper pattern for each tile, which she placed on a slab of clay, cut out the pattern, fired the piece, then glazed it and fired it once more.

“I spent a lot of time making the tiles,” she said, “working on tiles for one wall at a time, then arranging them.”

Arranging them meant placing the tiles with thin-set on the large panels on the floor of her studio, which posed a bit of a perspective challenge. When it came to lay out the flower and bird wall and its central focal point of a large tree, Dohna said it was too hard to figure out the perspective on the floor, so she set up the panels on a the walls of a friend’s barn. Once they were up, she projected the tree image onto the panels and outlined it. Then back in her studio, she could place the flowers and birds on the supine panels.

Dohna hired fellow tile artist Nadine Edelstein, of Tile Design by Edelstein, to help with the installation and final grouting on site at the market. Between bad weather and working around the sandblasters finishing up their work, the installation took much longer than Dohna expected. This was by far the biggest installation she has worked on. Given all the unknowns, she says she is ready to get back to residential work. But she’ll be taking a new element from the project with her: “faux bois.”

With the help of her sister, Mary, who is an expert at making “faux bois” or false wood, Dohna framed the fruit and vegetable wall with the fake cement wood.

“I thought it might be fun to make some framed pieces using the faux bois like the wall, more like making paintings (out of my tiles) that could go either in or outside.”

That said, Dohna is not saying never to doing another large-scale public installation.

“Maybe some day I’ll do another big one” she said. “I do enjoy making art for the people.”

The Pike Place Market Expansion Grand Opening will take place from 2 to 8 p.m. Thursday, with a ceremony, performances by local musicians and a variety of activities. For more information, see pikeplacemarketfoundation.org.