In the past few years I have been working with warm glass and learned to apply various techniques in order to create what was in my mind.
I still battle with them and it made me realise even more that working with glass is more than just bringing the image in your mind to life in a tangible form. To work with glass is so much more than expressing your creative inner self onto canvas with paint or other media.
To work with glass requires a serious degree of technical knowledge of the glass, the equipment and the temperature have to be perfectly insync. What is thermal shock? Wat is devitrification? Why is it important to know what COE means? Why is annealing crucial? I found lots of valuable information on the Warm Glass website and only one glimpse at the table with the various kiln forming processes and their respective temperatures gives an idea how one has to keep a cool head with kiln work. Another Q&A website is Glass Fusing made easy, which also looks at q&a when things go wrong. The Glass Art Techniques website elaborates on both hot and cold glass working techniques, the last one not only used to shape a work in its own right - even if no hot working techniques were applied - but also indispensable in many cases for the finishing touch of the work.
In other artforms, the artist can choose the time spent on the work, go away to reminisce and reflect, come back to add a detail or change colours or images, sometimes taking months or years to bring the work to completion.
With warm glass, one has to visualise the finished work and travel back in time to the starting point. From the initial creative idea, before you even start cutting, there is more technical planning and execution involved than I think in any art form. If one piece of glass is cut wrong, ... if it was from the wrong sheet of glass with a different COE, .... if the temperature has been too high, low, fast, slow,.... These are only some of the factors that can make or literally break the work.
Even though there are many books, websites, courses, etc that teach you step by step, it eventually comes down to test runs and punctual record keeping. If you know how the various techniques like slumping, fusing, tack fusing, casting work , refine the techicallities to suit YOUR kiln. A difference in make, year of fabrication, size of kiln, all play a vital role in the particular work performance of your kiln and to get to know this like it was another child will ensure less frustration in the future.
This is an example of a plate where I found out AFTER the firing that some of the Bullseye glass used was a striker glass - one that changes colour during the firing process.
Only when the kilndoor opens, you know if all the steps you planned were right.
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