Just a Friday

Here is the finished version of my circle project. I am not sure if I can get a better picture, but I may try tomorrow. I had thought about going out tonight, but walking home from dinner I decided it was too cold for me to bother, though that does mean I need to make a bit of an effort tomorrow night to get out. Yesterday I discovered that my upcoming 2 day glass workshop is cancelled, so I won't get to set up little vertical strips of glass and make things that way. I am sure it will show up again, and the biggest disappointment is that it means I will have less stuff to use as fusing fodder in my current class as well as my fusing 2 class. I was sort of hoping to get some fun bits and pieces from the strip class, but such is life.

While it is not late, I am yawning a bit, so I may just call it early and sleep, which is much more fun than venturing out in the cold and hoping someone will say "Hi" in a bar.

Seattle Snow

We don't have quite any of the snow they are predicting just yet, but today shortly after lunch we had a brief snow shower that had people leaving work in droves, and the news was reporting that the local authorities had urged everyone to get home early. I left at my regular time, on perfectly clean roads, with no scraping of the windows as the snow had already melted, and managed to get home quicker than normal, so the advisory must have worked, since traffic seemed light.

This is one of the final pieces I did in my glass fusing class, mixing glass painting, copper inclusions, and good old fashioned slumping. It is sort of a companion piece to the other square dish, but with brighter colors. I think it turned out well, and I was much happier with the glass painting after the project was done than with the initial view of what I had painted. Crudely painted flowers in my normal sketch/doodle style seem to look much better under glass, as the painting is now fused between two layers. I may play with glass paint a bit more, but don't think it will be in any curriculum until Fusing 2, which is a Spring class, but one I am already signed up for. I have also been forewarned that there will be more circles too.

The class I started last night is a pattern bar class, and there will be a lull in new work to post pictures of since it is a bit more process intensive than this class. Last night we applied kiln wash to kiln furniture, a process that should keep the bars from sticking to the furniture, and built our initial pattern bars. The piece I am envisioning will combine my two pattern bars with two of the coasters I made to build a larger piece where each quadrant will be different, though two will be very similar in their pattern. I can't say whether it will work and be pretty or not, but it gives me a direction right now, and gives me a good excuse to play with green and orange glass.

Monday's never seem to change

Monday's don't ever seem to change that much. Today was a holiday if you are lucky enough to work for the government or a business that recognizes it as such, but I don't, so all it meant for me was that traffic was a bit lighter. I did manage to get a decent picture of this glass piece finally. We had some sunny days over the weekend so I propped it in the window and there was finally enough light to illuminate the whole thing, rather than the bright spot with shadows that my other attempts drew, which were better than the ones were is is just green. Tomorrow starts a new glass class, and a new focus, which will be pattern bars, which from what I can tell can make pieces that are a bit more complex. I do have more fusing lined up, but that doesn't start until April, and by then I should have many more photos and many more projects and a fair amount more experience. Here is to also having a lot more blog entries, and hopefully I have enough commentary about what I am doing and what I learn and what I am attempting that it will be interesting reading.

Weary Sunday

I am not sure what exactly seemed to hit me last night or this morning, but I have been dragging along all day, for no obvious reason. Today's pictures is actually the third image I made in my block printing workshop a few weeks back. I currently have these three hanging as if to dry on a short section of wall, though truth be told I think I will leave them like that, with clothespins rather than mats and frames. In addition to dragging, it seems my brain has decided Jell-o is a better thing to emulate rather than its traditional structure. I was planning on bed in a bit anyway, though maybe it will end up earlier than anticipated.

Coffee and Saturday

A few things, I think this post marks the this as the most productive year in the last three for the blog. Too bad that wasn't such a hard thing for me to accomplish, considering the meager postings for the previous couple of years. Anyway, last night for the first time in several years I headed over to Capital Hill in Seattle to check out visit The Cuff and check in on a friend who I haven't seen in a bit. I am happy to say the friend is doing fine, and to my surprise, and this may be because I left around midnight, I didn't feel that I was the oldest guy in the room surrounded by twenty-somethings. Like earlier visits, most of the guys seemed happy to talk with only those they knew and while I did meet one local, the only other person I spent any amount of time chatting with was visiting from out of town. It was fun to get out, and I am actually going to make a go of getting out a bit more, and maybe, in time, I will have my own little clique to hang out with, though I don't have any high hopes there, as I may get tired of the game first.

Thursday's Stuff

For anyone interested in checking out Davo's writings, his blog has some links to places where he has just published. My congrats to him for the hard work and persistence required to get there.

I was going to go to a glass shop and buy some glass for an open studio tomorrow, but I chose not to since I had nothing designed, so my glass buying would be rather haphazard, and no doubt expensive as a result. I believe the open studios are monthly, so I should be able to design some stuff in time to prep properly for the next one.

I have been posting pictures on my Facebook page that show all the work from my class so far, though my own comments are not quite what they are here. This is the circle image I posted last week, but it has been fused. The bright orange where the other piece had been clear is due to that glass being "striker," meaning it changes into its true color after you have added the appropriate amount of heat. While not obvious in this photo, my nice clean lines between the colors aren't quite abutting each other in many places. I was told this is due to the fact that the upper layer of pieces, while in the kiln heating up begins to float a bit on the lower layer, which is why you can see some bends in the formerly straight stringers that I had placed on top of the piece. Of course, after I asked, I also learned that if I had built my party-colored circle under the piece of clear glass, then there would have been less float and my joins would have been more precise. Of course, my instructor decided to mention that doing that was impractical in a class since it is impossible to move pieces around that aren't glued together if changes in the kiln arrangement had been required to fit other student's work. So I learned a little something, and I still think my circle bowl will be fun. I am thinking it might be cool to make one with white opaque glass on top and a multi-colored layer below, though I would make the lower level fairly simple.

Decisions, decisions...

Pleasantly Surprised

This dish was a lot of fun, and went through many stages before finishing. I think I did some sort of process on it five of the six classes I had to work on it. It started out as a piece of glass we were given to teach us cutting and then tack fusing. Later, I added the color and gave it a full fuse, which melted all the tack fused glass perfectly smooth. The color spots were holes in the original piece. The I flip fused it so the little pieces of frit that looked like stones would be more obvious-- a case of the bottom looking better than the top. After that, I decided it needed to be a dish, so I slumped it. In the last class we learned how to use a sandblaster, so, at the instructor's suggestion, I gave the back a good blasting. The end result is something I like quite a bit and keep finding myself looking at. As a learning piece, I think it worked very well. As something decorative, it is a bit more personal, and will probably live someplace in the house, as it is much more organic than all the line oriented work that I did, which I like, but which has a certain formality to it. Pictures of some of those other pieces will certainly follow, but I thought it would be fun to share all the work that went into this one.

Nice Sunday of games

For those curious how my first real glass slumping project turned out, here is an image I took in the studio-- before is above, and after below. I love the way the light plays off the glass adding the highlights. Barely perceptible in the after picture is the fact the green and purple are transparent, which I think is due to their hue more than anything else. I am very pleased with the way it looks. I won't have before and after photos for most of my projects, as I don't seem to remember to take photos in the middle of class, just at the beginning or end. (One piece I slumped this week would not have made much of a before photo anyway, as it looked just like a sheet of green glass, since the pattern fused into the bottom would not have been noticeable.)

Today was fun, as I went over to a friend's house who was having a game day, so I spent some hours playing "Munchkin" with some total strangers, but met some new people and saw some folks I hadn't seen in a long time. The bridge table has gotten a bit more complex as they have the little boxes now that allow you to bid without having to vocalize, which of course makes a social game that much less social. I was trying not to bother the players too much, but I did ask questions about the bidding box thingy, which just seemed to make things way too formal. I seem to forget that some people take their bridge seriously.

Nothing wrong with straight lines

This is what my typical workspace looks like during glass fusing, with a notebook open to the wrong sketch on the left, though that was because this circle piece was done on the fly and I had not worked out what I wanted to do with it after I cut the circle, which was the days lesson--cutting circles. This is before fusing, but it shows the pattern I developed using the colors at hand, starting with the big square of purple I found in the scrap bin. So much of my work in this class has been geometric, the classmates in my immediate vicinity took to poking a bit of fun at me for all the straight lines, though so far, all those lines have paid off handsomely in nice looking pieces of glass.

Long week

Having taken that workshop over the weekend, this will be a long week, since I didn't get quite so much relax and do nothing time the last few days as I normally would. That isn't a bad thing, but I am sure I will be feeling it as the week progresses. Today's photo from the workshop results is basically different ink and papers with the self-portrait image. It was a lot of fun for me to see how the image would show with a few variables thrown in. Black and white is always nice, but sometimes color, or off-white paper really sets everything off.

I just compared this to the image from yesterday, which is actually the fourth image from the left, and in yesterdays, the color of the paper is totally missing, and I didn't do any processing of the photo besides cropping it, which is something I find interesting. I wonder if it is the contrast with the other images that gives the paper its proper color, or if some auto-adjust happened.

Finished, but not ready for work tomorrow.

Well, I am finished with my two day workshop, and today I did manage to finish the self-portrait shown here. I have it in black, which will eventually link, as I don't think the red on sage colored paper really shows the color of the paper. I printed up my other two images as well, also in a variety of colors, but did not get a start on a fourth image, other than a preliminary sketch. I was worn out around four, with two more hours to go, so I printed a few more images, but spent the rest of the time socializing and helping to clean up and whatnot. I can say I am pleased with the images, and may very well continue playing with this technique, though I am a bit concerned as to where I will do the carving, at least until it gets warm, since my living room is carpeted, and I doubt I want to try and remove linoleum chips from the carpet. It was definitely a fun class, and if you are interested in a relatively low tech printmaking technique, then I would suggest such a class, as you don't really need much in the way of special equipment. Oh well, time to wrap up and hit the sack.

Exhausted at the end of day 1

It has been so long since I spent an entire day focused on something like art making, I forgot just how exhausting it can be. The flamingo and lava lamp motif frequently showed up in my college printmaking and I could not resist the urge to bring them back. This is the first three stages, and the third may be the final, of this particular image. It is fun, and my birds can't help but appear sinister, though I don't recall ever being traumatized by Hitchcock's film. I took a photo of all three as I think it gives a nice overview of how things change during the carving of the block. I am hesitant of taking too much out in the beginning, so I always know the first is not likely to be my last, but with each additional removal I tend to focus on one area, then print to see how it works as a whole, before moving to the next. Of course this is probably slower, and I use a lot more paper and ink, but I like the variations, and changes. Someone mentioned in class that by doing this, I always have at least one image I may like, before I remove too much surface and ruin the piece. I guess tomorrow I find out if I end up doing that, though this process seems to be easy enough that I could do it at home, if I were careful, so theoretically if I don't do it in class, I have plenty of time to mess things up on my own.

Almost forgot a title for little more than an update.

Well, another week has passed and another class of fusing. I am having quite a bit of fun cutting and making glass pieces. Working with color here is very different from working with paint. The image above are some small pieces destined for an exchange at the end of class with the other students. This is prior to the fusing process, and I hope to remember to take post fusing photos of them for comparison, as it should be interesting. Other than the class and work, I haven't done much this week, so there isn't really much to post. I dislike posts like this, but I didn't want to forsake the blog for too long, as having done that in the past, once put to the side, it can remain there for far too long.