30 in 30 challenge - Day 2

The challenge for today was to create a tree using only your fingers and a business card.  I used this picture that I took at Ecola park on the Oregon Coast, with Haystack Rock in the background as inspiration.

I tried to stick to the prescribed tools, and did fine with the tree trunk, but when I started adding branches, I found that the business card was just too big to use for making small adjustments.  I went back to using my rubber spludger tool and was much happier.

I started, as I said, with the tree trunk and clean up it's edges using the business card.  Then I started adding branches.  At first I was being kind of literal, trying to copy the tree in the picture, but I soon gave up on that idea and just tried to mimic the general shape and density of the tree and branches.  I used the rubber spludger to clean up the branches and create forks and thought it looked pretty good.  Then I used just my fingers to sprinkle in some foliage. I'm reasonably happy with the results for the tree.

I thought that putting in the ground area under the tree and background area would be relatively easy, but it wasn't.  The biggest challenge was trying to figure out how to have Haystack Rock not get lost in the mountains behind it.  I wound up creating an unnatural halo around it to separate it.  I suppose that the right way to do this would be to use different densities of powder coverage for the rock vs the mountains, but I don't have that much control.  Perhaps with multiple firings, one could build up the density of the rock to make it stand out.

In any case, I had fun creating this image and was pleasantly surprised that I was able to make a respectable looking tree without too much effort.  My normal style of glass artwork is the exact opposite of organic, because depicting nature has always intimidated me.  I'm too much of a literalist and that gets in the way when you're trying to do something that has infinite detail.  Hopefully this 30 in 30 challenge will help me break out of that box.

30-in-30 challenge - Day 1

I wanted to start with something that I thought would be fairly simple, so I went browsing through my collection of clip art and found this:

It had pretty simple looking lines and not a lot of detail, so I thought maybe I could manage it.
I found a one foot square of almond colored glass and some black powder. The glass is System 96 and the powder is Bullseye, but I wasn't planning on fusing it, so it didn't matter that they were different COEs.

I thought that I should try and do the farthest back parts of the image first, so I started with the right frond. I started working up from the bottom, which was probably a mistake, but I somehow managed to not drag my arm though my work anyway.  I kind of misjudged my starting point on the glass and didn't really leave enough room, so my version got vertically compressed a bit and I wound up not doing the overlap between the blossom and the frond.  Just as well, it was more challenging that I originally thought as it was.

I spent about an hour and a half working on it and I confess that I used more tools than just my fingers and a business card.  Mostly, I used a little rubber smudger tool to push powder around and make small adjustments. I liked using the business card for long flowing lines, but when I tried to use it for details I found that I often couldn't get it in the right position to make the adjustment that I wanted without disturbing something else.  I also found that with the business card, I was often working blind because the line I was trying to adjust was on the other side of the card.

Another issue that I struggled with was line weight.  I often wound up with too much powder in one place and not enough in another.  I wasn't very successful when I tried to remove just a little powder from the heavy areas and usually wound up destroying that line and having to recreate it.

I had fun with this and really liked the way I could just sort of push lines around until they looked right to me. Much easier than having to erase and redraw as I would on paper.  Here is my final result.