Dale Chihuly is this Seattle-based artist that does this amazing blown glass work (pictured left); I've been stoked on it for a while, and my roommate, whose birthday is coming up next month, REALLY digs on it. Of course, it would be SO cool to do a neat chandelier or installation piece like that, except for the fact that I don't know anything about glass-blowing. Whoops!
Cut to me at the library earlier in the week, where I look up craft to find out how to better sculpt a dog-face charm for a different friend's birthday, and I find a book on polymer clay (like Sculpey...). I've worked with it before, but YEARS ago as a kid when I was much more limited in my abilities. You just sculpt stuff and put it in the oven to harden. If I had to guess, I would say that it's bonds become a firm plastic-like substance with the heat (Sculpey can be pretty fragile, but I guess other brands are less kid-friendly but more stable...).
Anyway, this book that I looked at had TONS of great ideas and pictures, unlike the internet in this case. There were sections on how to make the clay look like wood, metal, and GLASS!!! So beyond being perfect for sculpting a little charm for a bracelet (I was going to sculpt from oil-based clay, cast a negative mold in plaster, then re-cast a positive in this harder "stone" plaster, after which I would have to chisel with a screwdriver out this little dog's face... I've done it before with other projects: NOT FUN!), apparently I could use it to replicate blown glass.
Technically, there was only one page on the subject, and it wasn't really a how-to. It just showed a picture of the result (I don't know how they mix all the colors together to look like tie-dye, but afterwards you sand the shit out of it and then hit it with numerous coats of lacquer, my new favorite thing!) and had a brief paragraph about the artist and how amazed everyone was that his work was plastic clay and not glass...
So I'm still flying blind, here. I have a mental picture of what the final product should look like (theoretically, since I still haven't drawn up any designs...), but only a vague sense of how to make it work. I'm guessing that I need to put the colors that I want together and roll them out to be flat and smooth and then drape or shape them somehow...
This is more what the picture in the book looked like:
Chihuly does orbs and all those crazy spires, though, which I think I would like to play around with more, although it does seem like it would be tougher to sand them or keep them from breaking.
Expect some updates on this in the coming weeks. Until then...
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