I'm playing a bit with silver stain. I've never painted on glass before, so that's fun. I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I am in love with the rich tones that the silver stain turns on Bullseye French Vanilla. It's awesome, and seems to be quite varied.
Fired in the little painting kiln to 530C for about 10 minutes (hooray for the very precise controller on that one!)
So I love the rich reds on the bullseye tekta, (bottom two on the left) and the brown that the french vanilla turns (top left.) The stain is much too thin to really use to engrave through - you can see some of the cuts I've made into the stained pieces. I wasn't expecting to be able to do much in the way of shading with it, but I am kind of amazed at just how thin it really is. I cut through it immediately, just by touching it to an engraving wheel. Though I didn't try it on the copper wheels with fine grit, so maybe I should see how that goes. It's sort of too bad, but it might be interesting to see about using silver stain in the fire polish stage of my engraving to highlight some of the cuts. So, I'll need to do another test for enamel and silver stain on Bullseye whites and french vanilla at 600C for 10 minutes.
On another note, I need to get down to the metal studio to see about making frames for things. Jeff and I were looking at some of the engravings on a light box in the studio and I think he's finally been the one to convince me that they need light behind them... Natural light is too harsh, but just a little bit of LED or fluorescent light, and very controlled, would do them good. They're definitely better with a little bit of light than without it.
