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.