Glass sticks to almost anything when it's hot, and practically nothing when it's cold, which is why I love it as a work surface. It's also why it's such a pain when you have to stick, say, a hollow pate de verre relief sculpture onto a wall. We won't go into the time I used GE Silicone II to attach hangers to three pate de verre panels for a show, except to say I'm very, very glad that pate de verre bounces.
The newly renovated garage studio is starting to look like a weird kiln store; Oliver Wendell Kiln finally joined his brothers in the garage this afternoon (with a great deal of assistance from his chauffeurs). It's taken nine months to get him here so I kinda feel like I gave birth to a giant space heater today.
The art of casting is also the art of spending money. I publish a little resource list (I think it's now six pages long) of where to buy all the stuff you need for casting. None of it's cheap and most of it's indispensable. Interestingly, though, there's also a bunch of stuff that's equally indispensable but can be had on the cheap. Here's my list of 18 cheap THINGS you should keep around a casting studio to make your life (and your bank account) easier. ...
When embarking on a career as an artist, it's important to have a well-traveled kiln. And so Oliver Wendell, my new kiln, appears to be taking the long way home.
Normally, I craft my mother molds out of plain old plaster of paris. It's cheap, relatively quick and the cleanup is easy. But the resulting shell is also heavy and brittle, hard to store and prone to chipping off in exactly the spot you need it to be whole. Smooth-on's Plasti-Paste promises to alleviate at least 75 percent of those problems but costs about $17; plaster costs about $3. To work, the Plasti-Paste shell needs to be VERY light, VERY rigid and VERY easy to get off the mold. So...here goes.
I’m posting this one as a response to some folks on warmglass asking about kilncarving, so please bear with me. I’ve experimented with the level of detail possible in a kilncarving, and been pretty pleased with the results. At some point I’ll go back and mess with this some more, see what I can do. (And apologies for the crummy [...]
Serves 12... if you can find the plates Blow the dust off your old recipe box and pull out that superb three-years-in-development recipe for your award-winning Triple-Chocoholic cake. No recipe. Recall the time you were late for the hotshop, needed a couple of index cards to line up colored powder on the marver like cocaine on a mirror, and the [...]
Those of you who cast glass know that one thing casting ISN’T, is good for your hands. Between plaster, investments, clay, coldworking, etc., casting is just about the worst thing you can do to a good set of digits. I’ve spent a small fortune on lotions and emolliments designed to bring my chapped, cracked, and generally gruddley hands back to [...]
As I'm sitting here digging investment out of tiny little nooks and crannies in my latest glass casting, I'm suddenly struck by the immense number of glass casters whose work runs to sensuously smooth, unadorned imagery. Do you suppose that's because, unlike me, they're smart enough to realize what happens when you put lots of @#$)*^#@%! tiny detail in a [...]
This post was originally published on my old blog in 2008. I thought it deserved a replay. It’s also inspired me to go find the sample piece I’m showing here, one of my hosta bowl series, and see if I can’t finally finish the thing. I’m not a great fan of the waxes used in lost wax casting, mostly for the [...]
