Broken Glass and New Projects

Well. I know it's been a while, and quite a few things have happened since my last post. I finished cutting my owl, transferred him to the candle plate that was to be his final nesting place, and glued him down, but to my dismay, when I came out to begin filling in the background chunk glass, I discovered that there were at least ten large cracks in the glass. Sigh.

I think that I used too much glue, and as it dried it pulled at the glass and caused stress fractures. But, that's working with glass. As long as I can figure out (or at least theorize) what happened, I can't be disappointed. So, Mr. Owl is set aside for the moment.

On the upside, I did manage to finish the cartoon for the owl panel, and have begun cutting. I'm happy with the pattern, and have happily spent this weekend choosing colors and playing with tones. School has begun, which means that progress on the owl panel will most likely be patchy and slow, as I start work on my thesis, but it will give me a nice outlet from it. I can't go too far until I speak to Grace about reinforcing issues, which will be something new for me, so even though it'll be a playful outlet from heavy thesis stuff, I'll be working on new things at the same time. The finished cartoon measures 24" x 24", and is designed to fit into an old wooden window frame abandoned at work.

Foliage Issues? Bring on the Mosaics!

Because I was having so many issues drawing out the pattern, and in the meantime, was getting increasingly more and more frustrated at the fact that I wasn't cutting yet, I decided to take the owl pattern and mosaic him onto a candle plate while continuing to work on the larger window pattern. This way I'll be able to relieve some of my cutting frustrations while finalizing the pattern in a pressure-free environment.

So. I decided to take pictures of each step, mostly because I've never been good at photo-documentation, and am getting nervous about consistency when it's time to begin work on my thesis. Of course, I forgot that rather important fact until I'd already cut half the dang thing anyway. So this is Mr. Owl, he's a pretty simple creature, not many pieces, and none of the shapes are too difficult. I decided to do him in blues for the mosaic plate, as a nod to his nocturnal nature. His wings and the top of his little head are all going to be a darker, rich blue. To define his eyes and make them "glow" a bit, I decided that an amber ringed in a lighter blue would be perfect, the pupils of his eyes are just a hole that I drilled in the center of the piece and will fill in with grout later. His soft underbelly is going to be a lighter, purplish blue.

Even though this is a mosaic and I won't be using any copper foil or solder, I still had to grind the edges of each piece. It was a necessary step because I wanted him to have a specific shape, clearly defined, and because he's symmetrical. If his left half differs from his right, he's going to look lopsided and horribly sloppy. The background, which I'll probably do in varying shades of green, will be comprised of chunked scrap glass, and for that the grinder will be completely unnecessary, but for now it's my best friend.

You can really see why grinding is so important, especially on circles. I have a circle cutter, but most of the circles I use in my patterns are smaller than what the circle cutter can cut, and when I first started stained glass, I wanted to become proficient without the use of "shortcuts," so even though I have one, I've never actually used it. The grinder gets rid of the little nubs that come with cutting a circle, and provides a nice smooth edge.

After each piece has been cut and been given a real quick trip to the grinder to take the razor edge off the glass, it's put back on the pattern so I can match it up with the cut lines and mark any minor adjustments that are needed before it's final grind. It's an essential step, especially in stained glass. In mosaics it's not as important unless there's a set pattern that's being followed. Because each piece depends on the pieces that surround it for its shape and fit, if one piece is off pattern even slightly, the whole work will grow off of it, and the finished piece will be horribly off or out of square.

After the pieces have been checked against the pattern and all grinding has been done, I piece it onto the pattern using straight pins (the pattern in taped down onto a ceiling tile, so that the pins can easily be rearranged and bite in deeply to hold the pieces securely). Most times when I'm doing a mosaic I don't use the tile and pins, but just glue each piece down as I go along. For the owl, I wanted a very thin and consistent grout line between each piece, and was afraid that if I glued each piece down as it was cut, I would run into issues with the grout line becoming inconsistent and the pattern shifting.

And so that's it, this is what I have so far for the owl plate. I just need to finish cutting his body, then I'll glue him down, let him dry, and start on the chunk glass background, and at the same time I'm working on the cartoon for the large window. All in all, I'm happy! I get to play with glass while still working towards a pattern that won't be in danger of compromise due to impatience. Yaaay!

Foliage Issues

I've finally gotten my workshop back in (relative) order. It's amazing the devastation that settled in during the eight months I was gone. During my absence, my shop became a general dumping ground of odds and ends and all genres of junk, a portion of my ceiling began to collapse, and I lost electricity (somewhere there was a break in the cable), so mold and mildew began setting up house. It took me quite a while, but the junk has been cleared away, I screwed a board to the studs in the ceiling to hold it in place, and electricity, a dehumidifier, and lots of bleach have evicted the mold.

I decided that I wanted my first panel back to be something fun and cutesy (mainly because I'm afraid that my skills have rusted, and starting with something simple seemed to be a good idea) and I settled on a summer night sky and a big-eyed-little-bug of an owl. After a ton of image pulling, I've finally managed to sketch out the little cutie I felt I was waiting for, but now I'm having a lot of trouble with the background. I want him sitting on a branch on a summer night, but I'm having issues with (of all things!) the leaves. Leaves! How ridiculous is that? No one has issues with leaves! The main difficulty I seem to be having (besides my lack of drawing ability) seems to be trying to create a jagged and interesting line of leaves and open sky, and at the same time, not filling the border between the two with impossible cut lines. Sigh. I really wanted to start cutting soon, but first it seems I need to overcome my foliage issues.

Ok. So I’m new to a few things here. I’ve never kept a blog before, and I’m still new to stained glass and the artistic process as a whole. And as for my main goal--to become a proficient traditional glass painter--well, let’s just say that I have just about as much experience in that as I do in performing open heart surgery.

But, that said, I have a year left before I graduate, and my senior thesis is going to be centered around creating an artistic representation of Dante’s Inferno in stained glass, while incorporating traditional glass painting methods (crap, just typing it out made me nervous). I want to use this blog to record my process from start to finish, so that I have documentation of my utter brilliance and genius…or more like a record of the failures that propel me forward to a finished work. But, knowing my history of procrastination and half-finished projects, I thought I’d get started early, to see if I even have a chance of making a digital record of the process work, so I decided to just start keeping a blog of the projects that I'm currently working on.