"Psalm 103" (draft 2)

(draft 2)

Psalm 103 is still center stage. I am going particularly slow with my steps this time to completely show how to combine elements to create opacity, translucency, and transparency. My love for glass is meshing with my love of mixed media. In just a few weeks, I will have completed 800 postings and what I have learned about my own artistic voice is helping me now to completely focus on the above mentioned elements as the core of all my work.

Yesterday's posting was completely easy to do because very few decisions needed to be made. Today, I have cropped that larger section of 300 lb. HP down to a 6" x 12" size. It has not been adhered to the 2" depth clayboard yet. When there are three dimensional inclusions, it is best not to adhere those to the support until the piece is mounted on the clayboard.

My decisions about where to crop had everything to do with the title of the piece. The glass has areas with no darker powders fused so I was careful to make sure that Psalm 103 could be read through the glass. It was also important to include as many of the tabs which create that half moon shape. (A wonderful thing to look for when purchasing very old bibles for this type of work.) It creates a repetitive shape, which in turn, creates rhythm.

Even though you cannot see it clearly in my posting, I also placed some metallic leaf where the glass will be mounted...being careful not to cover all of the text. I also have a piece of plain rice paper which falls underneath the glass to further heighten the value of some of the letters in the glass. So you can see that the process now slows down a bit and becomes much more deliberate.

There will be more plain rice papers added, but I stopped with the sections of metallic leaf and one layer of rice paper to show you the translucent effect that one single sheet of rice paper creates. (Remember that it will not become translucent until sprayed with Krylon Spray Acrylic Coating.) The metal leaf, of course, is completely opaque and covers up everything.

You will also notice that I overlapped some of the plain rice papers over the metal leaf to create interesting values, shapes, and edges. The choice of placement for the metal leaf was based again on edges. I tend to frame things out with my elements (loosely) unless I choose an all over grid format arrangement. Almost all of the metal leaf is position on an edge of the perimeter.

Even though there were not too many additions today, there were many choices made. As I move forward, I will be choosing what part of the text I want to remain translucent and what part I want to cover up completely. And the choice of transparency has already been made with the glass. One other thing...if you are not into glass fusing, you can also use stained glass. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.