I've been experimenting with bullseye reactive colours still, I'm making a few long plates, just to give myself a form to play in. They're beginning to remind me of maps with lines of latitude and longitude, so I think I'm going to keep working with that... but I don't really have much to say about it right now.
For anyone who follows this blog that is not a glassy person, and I don't know if you exist, glass can be interesting in that it doesn't look the same way before its been fired as it does after it has, so this one's for you. The optics change, and the size and shape of the glass you're using matters, sometimes when you want white, a really finely ground clear glass can work perfectly with the right firing, because the large comparative surface area of each particle can interfere with the light moving through the piece enough to make it look white. Or, here, you can sort of see a difference between a hotter fuse, on top, and a cooler one, below, with a similar application of the same powdered black glass. It shows better in real life of course, where in the top example, the image is totally melted into the base glass, and smooth, while the bottom example has a relatively significant texture, and is almost totally opaque, even though technically the glass is a transparent colour.
The glasses I've been using recently are interesting because they have chemistry that interacts at the places where the glass touches at temperature. The first picture is how it looks before firing, white, cream, and clear, with silver leaf on the left piece. The second picture is the same glass, after firing (the shelf is white now because the red colouring in the kiln wash burns out at temperature.) The last picture isn't the same glass, but it shows the same types of reactions with differently shaped glass.
At temperature, the lead in the Dense White (Bullseye 0313) reacts with the Sulfur in the French Vanilla (Bullseye 0137) to create the grey interface reaction that you see above around the strips of glass, or below in the top left of the picture, around the white frit. The reaction of the Silver with french Vanilla is quite dramatic, I love the texture of the blue parts of it, and the ochre-coloured halo that it creates. Also, in the image below, you can see Turquoise Blue (Bullseye 1116) frit, which is a copper glass, over the silver and French Vanilla, which turns into a lovely rich brown at the interface, an creates a beautiful moroccan blue over the silver leaf.
Yeah, so thats what I've been up to lately, along with some engraving, as per usual. There are more pictures of some of the tests that I've added into
the album from the last post.
