"Rejoice" (Preliminary Textures 2)

(Preliminary Glass Texture for "Rejoice")

Glass is still flying out of the kiln at a fast clip....but no faster than (12) hours. For that reason, every kiln load has to be carefully considered when creating a three layer glass collage. You can see the addition of readable lettering today.

Tomorrow, I will have some that will be even more readable on the top layer of at least one of the three separate sections making up this collaboration. In the final presentation, these pieces will be in a steel wall sculpture with three different sized openings.

Unlike yesterday's posting, the image today is the beginning of cutting and layering glass in such a way as to have texture and lettering in different depths of the collage. And this is the advantage of layering in glass. As hard as I've tried to achieve this in mixed media, it simply cannot compare to the richness of glass.  Having said that, there are also some things that can be done with papers and mixed media techniques that cannot be done in glass. It's all a great journey and ever so much fun to experiment with.

So today...instead of having three pieces of glass laying on top of each other in the same size...I have cut glass and inserted textures from other pieces and also used the white opaque as the bottom piece. Tomorrow, I hope to have some smaller areas that have clear glass on the bottom layer with slight texture on the other two layers to create a contrast between pure transparency and opacity. There will also be some areas that are quite translucent. For this reason it is wise to have a multitude of choices before you.

Since I already have a lot of textured pieces, I am presently firing some pieces with very simple additions of glass line paint mixed with powders and thinned to a translucent mixture. This is then brushed on to the glass, but not over the entire glass. It is very important to keep some areas as clear glass so that the layering effect has the potential of creating more depth.

You can now see why my brain is tired from thinking. Hopefully, this will encourage my glass loving friends to carry on with the knowledge that you are not the only one turning yourself into a pretzel by this type of thought process. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.