"Transparency"

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There is no quote associated with today's image because it was created to be incorporated into a mixed media piece. There are many of the same lines and edges from yesterday's posting simply because this piece was create from the leftover fragments from that study.

We are all aware that art is a process. What we know in creating a piece of art always stems from our process...the way we work. I like to work by incorporating techniques that I have discovered in isolation. For instance, if I want to see what happens when I lay one element on top of another, I will be inclined to do a small study to see what that looks like before delving into a larger piece with many components. So what you're seeing today is a small study experimenting with transparency.  This study informs me about how much texture I would want to include vs. how much transparency I want.

In yesterday's posting much of the same imagery you see today was fired again after arranging the textured black and white areas on a sheet of opaque yellow glass. In today's image, I laid those textured pieces of white and black on top of another piece of glass that had been fired with transparent powders sifted on top of Tekta (clear glass) rather than an opaque piece of glass.

However, the powders were not sifted randomly, but in a gradated fashion by starting with a heavy sifting at one end of the glass and going lighter as I continued sifting to the other end. This created a touch of color, but illuminated many of the  hard edges and shapes which you saw yesterday.

It's simply another way of being more subtle and also allowing other images to be seen through the glass. So I laid the two layer collage of fired glass over an old text page to show the level of transparency. This gives me a good idea of what to expect when I incorporate it into my mixed media work. And so it goes with my particular process. 

I think the "take away" here is to think through your process carefully and experiment in small pieces before trying to complete a more complex work. So many things in process are not particularly difficult, but must be broken down into "bite size" segments in order to get a clearer picture of how to integrate your elements together. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.