Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Images on Glass II


The experiments continue - my friend Jan and I made 22 more samples of printing onto glass. Do you see how amazing these blocks are (in the picture above)?! We used Rubber Duckies, a Hammer, Birds on a Line, a Benson Bubbler (water fountains in PDX), and a set of Hearts.

We were very methodical, trying 5 new types of ink (one image for each type of ink so its easy to remember!), an oil based ink (last time we used a rubber based ink), a lithograph ink, an etching ink and an oil based ink that had metal in it (it was called "Copper Gold"), and lastely a transparent Rubber based ink that we mixed colored glass powder into it. We also tried different colors of glass powders/frit (last time we used only black powder and frit).

Interesting observations: glass powder mixed with ink is possible, but it behaves weirdly. The ink sorta seems to cling to the glass particles and create fractal patterns. See: (pictured below is ink under a magnifying lens)
Okay, its come to my attention that the last video I posted from my on-going project of printing on glass, it was not a complete video. :) This was entirely my fault.... the video ended because I hadn't set up the glass for Jan to transfer the ink onto, so I had to stop the video to put down the camera and be helpful and arrange the glass. Jan has been doing the inking and I do the glass. So this next video is much more complete - although I am once more leaving out the end - sheesh! Because inevitably I have to put down the camera in order to pick up the glass frit/powder...



my apologies for having a volume control issues - enjoy the music :)

so if you watched this whole thing (its 3 minutes) and wonder what comes next... basically its simple, I take some glass powder or frit and dump it onto the glass, covering the ink, then I turn the glass over and tap it to knock off all the excess powder/frit. Sometimes I have to take a paint brush to dust off a little clingy stuff, but mostly thats it. Then I fire the glass at a full fuse and the ink is burnt away, completely, leaving behind the print made by the glass powder/frit.

See here for our first results after kiln firing.

And the last experiment of the day was transporting all this glass - we worked at Jan's printing studio this time (the glass studio gets a little busy on the weekends and we need lots of space) and made two trips with the car to carry the inked glass to Aquila. It worked out very smoothly, although I really didn't push things, I just folded up my back seats and laid it all out on trays.

Enjoy!

2 comments:

Beck said...

Yay paint, yay glass, yay paint on glass!! ;O) Very cool idea.

Amanda said...

I can't wait to see the results of this next test! I'm always interested in new ways to get designs onto glass. ;)

Oh! My decals should be coming this week, and Sean is now my full-time employee, so we should get together at Aquila soon!