The great thing about working with glass is that there is no waste. I stack scraps and melt them together to make "puddles" or those colorful little cabochons that I can use for jewelry or the centers of flowers and countless other things. I make them when the kiln is not busy firing other things and save them for when I need them. I also like to experiment with them. Today, I put them all in a plate mold and threw it all in the kiln to see if I could get a usable plate out of it. We'll see what happens. If it doesn't work, It's no big deal because I can break them apart and reuse them for something else or I can crush up the glass to get some multi-colored frit (crushed glass).
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Not long ago, you might remember I did a few tests of some of the COE 90 dichroic glass. Doing tests is an important part of the glass artwork I do, but reusing the test pieces is also important. Pictured below shows the steps taken for a single piece from beginning to end. We start by cutting the glass and firing to a full fuse. After it comes out of the kiln, it goes on the grinder to smooth out the edges and square them up. This gives the piece a nice finished look. Once I have the piece ground to my liking, I embellish the glass and glue on a bail. It's faster and easier to glue on a bail than to drill a hole, but I can use a diamond drill bit in my Dremel to drill a hole into the glass rather than use a bail.
Remember to take photos of the test piece before you grind and embellish. The main purpose was testing new glass and then we got an added bonus of creating pendants from our tests. I'm in the process of working out my calendar for the next few weeks. When I plan my calendar out like this, I also need to plan out my pieces to a certain degree. The first part, of course, is to determine what the main elements of the piece be. Once I've decided the main elements (1 - 3), I need to research. I search the internet to see what are the complimentary elements. That is, what other things can I expect to see alongside those elements in nature. Why in nature? Because nature is the one common thread in all of my creations. I am inspired by nature and so create items in nature. Let's get back to the design elements. Some mushrooms feed on decaying wood, especially bracket mushrooms, so to build the piece that included bracket mushrooms on a piece of driftwood, birch or cedar would be perfect! If I were to include amanita muscaria mushrooms (those red cap mushrooms with the white spots), I would want to include "pine needles" since it's really impractical for me to make a glass pine tree to scale. We could include any kind of plant life, rocks, sticks or mulch and insects like butterflies, dragonflies and/or ladybugs. It's when I start thinking about all of these things, that I get really excited. There are so many choices and before I know it, I have something of beauty before I know it. Now that I have an idea of what some of the elements might be in my sculpture, I want to choose the right base. Choosing wood is only one part of the equation. I also need it to be the RIGHT piece of wood. Not all wood is a good fit. It needs to be the right size and sit well. In addition, it should have the right form. If I'm going to be adding bracket mushrooms, there needs to be a place for me to attach these bracket mushrooms so they look natural. Once I have my wood chosen, the first pieces I cut from glass are the major design elements. These are the elements that I want the viewer to notice first or the highlight elements. In this example, it will be 5 different types of mushrooms (red, purple, white, yellow and brown bracket). The other major elements will be dragonflies and ladybugs. The dragonflies will be perched on grass tips and on one mushroom. The ladybugs will be on the ground and maybe on a couple mushrooms. Minor elements will be grass, pine needles, stones and lichens or moss. With this all planned out in my head, I can draw it out and use that as my blueprint. Sometimes it's easier for me to actually draw the pieces out onto paper, color them and cut them out. Then I can rearrange them on the base to best determine how I want the piece to look. With the envisioning I did with this mushroom piece, I think you can expect to see a piece with mushrooms, maybe ferns, ladybugs and dragonflies in the future using the piece of wood shown below. This week I'm spending time in Boston taking care of my grandson while my daughter is away. While I can't do any actual glasswork, I can do other things that I think are helpful to my work. The first step is to observe the natural world. This doesn't mean look around and say, "that's a pretty tree." It's more than that. It's paying attention to how leaves are attached to the trees and seeing how the grass bends when the wind blows because these are the things I want to capture in my work. These are the details that make the difference between average and good work. When I create a piece, I frequently pull my ideas from my memory of experiences or images I captured and then let my glass art create itself. It's never a duplication, but rather a starting point. Usually one element from that photograph I took or memory I held on to that is the foundation of many pieces I've made.
Keeping a glass journal is one of those things you either love or hate but really NEED. Why? It helps to replicate those things that really worked and gives you what you need to avoid doing those terrible things over and over again. We've all had things flop because part of what we do requires experimentation. Some experiments are successful but some are not. We want to document what does and what does not work. In addition, we need to know how the glass responds under specific conditions.
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