Week 6 (Week Beginning 01/03/10)

Looking For Inspiration

Over the weekend while looking for some thing to draw, I came across my sister sketch book which had a couple of pictures of and eroded sandstone rock face. I thought the curves in it were similar to the ones I had been carving in plaster. This is the drawing I did of one of the photos (the images quality isn't very good, my camera was dying when I took the photo).
I found out that the photos were taken in a place in Bridgenorth called the Hermitage. So on the Monday I took a bus to Bridgenorth (not sure why, but it is a nice place) and carved caves into the sand stone. I had been told that the are had been closed off after the caves collapsed about a year ago this was probably why I wasn't able to fine it or see any directions. Any way I managed to find a steep muddy path to a sandstone rock face that had eroded.
Looking at the drawing now it looks a bit like body, might be worth doing some life drawing at some point in the future for my sketch book. Anyway....

Here are some of the photos I took (of Sandstone):


Making Multiples

I've started getting bored of carving shapes I might never use and didn't particularly like so I thought I'd try to cut a shape I was happy with. So using one of the larger triangles I'd cut I used my small arcitectual form to measure out how to make a scaled up version of it but without the corner cut off. I took the piece after soaking it for a while and stated to cut it out on the architectural could get it cleaned up and make a mould of it.
I managed to cut the edges that were at 90 degree angles to each other but there was an angle I had a bit of trouble doing, at first I tried drawing out the kind of angle I would need on the plaster and follow that along but I didn't seem to get it right, and the pieces stated going some odd looking angles so in the end I just went for it with the view if it goes wrong its just plaster and I'm sure I could cast another block of plaster the right kind of size to do it. Not expecting to get it right, Yes! I DID IT! Go me XD I squealed in delight and I'm not too embarrassed to say I did a little happy dance. But, I didn't take a photo of that, I took a photo of the boring plaster polishing smoothing bit *yawn* fortunately I was still in a good mood and I was quite happy just to be at that stage. The image is the soggy plaster piece on a piece of sandblasted glass then I sand it down on the glass by moving it around in a figure of eight motion. Some of the sides didn'tas they were still flat from being cast onto boards, the most challenging bit was the odd angle I had cut, but still it wasn't that wonky and not much trouble to get flat.
Now for the exciting bit mould making but not before soaping, not sure if I've mentioned about soap before if I haven't you should know about it cause it's somethign mould maker/plaster worker should know about, it lubricates the plaster or anything with a porous surface to stop the plaster from sticking to it.When making moulds you should always soap the table where your pouring your plaster to stop it from sticking also. When preparing to make this mould I soaped my model atleast seven times because I really didn't want to ruin my.
The next step after what seemed like it could have been several hours of soaping, I started setting up the boards around the piece. I left two sides flat against a board and the table so they wouldn't be covered with plaster. So when I make more of these triangular models with the mould in plaster or wax I can choose between a large surface to pour into or a smaller.
The boards around the mould were secured with clay and had rope tied around it. I then had to mix 15pints of water and plaster to fill the mould. Unfortunately my mould wasn't strong enough, and the board at the back that the plaster model was resting on slipped away and the wet plaster started to seep out. Lovely Mark (The Plaster Master) came to my rescue, and caught a large amount of the wet plaster in a bucket and poured in in while I held the boards in place, it's a good job 15pints of plaster was a little too much.
Thinking about it now I should have made my mould with the larger surface lying down as the weight of the plaster was too much for the taller boards, and if I had lay the piece down I could have had boards around the piece saving a lot of plaster, silly me.
When I removed the boards after the plaster had dried I found that I had lost the flat surface for the larger side of the triangle and had to carve down the surface with a surform.

The surform is the red tool just at the bottom of the picture, its a great tool for flattening off edges and carving down surfaces and making them look flatter and neater. To take the weight off the piece Mark cut the waste bit of plaster off for me on the band saw (this is probably the most help I've had off Mark ever, I'm not really one to ask for help I just like to get on with things and make my own mistakes, but I'm not against getting a little wisdom form others now and again) I got that surface surformed and tidy up the edges of the mould a little.

I was originally just going to use a board every time I wanted to use this mould to make a model but because the surface wasn't very flat I chose to make a 2 part mould out of it. Before pouring any more plaster on to the mould I made some natches (little indents) in the plaster so when I take a mould off them (to make little lumps) there is a negative of the natches so its easy to locate where to put the 2 halves of the mould together (you can see these little bumps on the images above and below). Next step soap.... When the mould was all soaped up I put boards around it and secured it with clay and rope (didn't really need to rope just after having the earlier spillage I didn't want a repeat). For the other half of the mould I only needed 2 pints of water and plaster

Mould all done and ready to use :)

Just need to remembered to soap it up well when using plaster and giving it a good soak when using wax.

Casting Billets

After giving it some time and though I decided to use clear glass and jade green as the colour for this piece, I came to this disition after looking at some of my glass work from last semester. The odious colour would have been the copper blue but I found a couple of piece where I had used copper wire and I preferred the colour in this, it had a slight tint of green to it and seem more of a natural colour compared to the copper blue. I also thought the copper blue was a bit too bright and I wanted my work to have a calming flowing watery look to it to reflect the wave I had carved out the plaster model.
Using the both billets in the image above was going to be too much glass for this piece so I got the jade green billet cut in half to reduce the weight.
Again I have chosen to a flower pot as a resavwars for my piece. I put the jade green at the bottom of the flower pot and the balanced on top. I want the jade green to be at the tip of the piece and hopefully as the clear starts to flow to the two colours will blend together to make the colour change suttle. I'm not sure if this will happen as this is my first time using the billets. It's a good job this is a rather small piece, the glass for this cost just over £17, compared to about £3 if I were using just clear glassma.
As I would like to make a bigger piece I think its a sensible idea to make a smaller piece to test before jumping into spending loads on something you have no idea how it will work out.

Here is the kiln program I used*:

50 ⁰C/hr → 500 ⁰C → Pass hrs
Full ⁰C/hr → 830 ⁰C → 3.00 hrs
100 ⁰C/hr → 600 ⁰C → Pass
15 ⁰C/hr → 440 ⁰C → 4.00 hrs
10 ⁰C/hr → 360 ⁰C → Pass
20 ⁰C/hr → 310 ⁰C → Pass
50 ⁰C/hr → 21 ⁰C → Pass
End

*To come up with this program I used a chart provided on the gaffer glass website

Week 4 (Week Beginning 15/02/10) Continued

Kiln Casting

At the start of week 3 I made a mould to make Sven a twin brother, but not an identical one. When I made the mould I made some space of excess glass by sitting the piece on some rolled out clay and cut around the edges to continue the shape and because the last one I did, I had to spend some time flat bedding the piece so it could be could on the glass band saw. This way I would have to do as much cold working and if I needed some glass cut off I could get it done faster. I used the same mould mix of Plaster, Silica, HT and water but I ended up having to get some more mould mixture after I had poured because I had made the walls around the mould slightly wider than I did the last time. When the mould had dried long enough so I could take away the walls I cleaned up the mould and removed the wax and clay using some tools. When I was happy the mould was clean enough I put the mould in the drying cuboard and left it there until Friday. I wanted to see if I could get more of the copper colour in the glass (without buying the Light Copper Oxide colour of the Gaffer Casting Crystal, which I am considering getting for my final piece of work) so instead of just sieving the copper oxide in I just tipped a load in (I know very technical) then brushed it around the mould to cover all the surfaces, I wanted to put some into the flowerpot reservoir I was using but I've done this before and it makes an orb of colour in the middle of the piece (not really what I wanted). Instead of doing a displacement test I took Sven and weighed him on some scales, he was about 680g. Then I weighed out 680g of glass but it didn't look like very much compared to the size of Sven, so I put and extra 100g in because I thought about hown I had needed to cold work the piece so I'd taken some weight off (not 100g but its better to have more than you need compared to not enough). When I had set every thing up, put the glass in to the flower pot and set up some pieces of kiln shelf to rest it on and put it in the kiln to cast over the weekend. But unfortunately someone must have opened it and forgot to turn it back on or I was a bit of a plum and forgot to turn it on - but I am very sure I turned it on. Anyway when I came in on Monday morning to see how the cast was going I discovered my glass set up just as I had left it (cold and un melted). So I locked the kiln and turned it on checking it repeatedly to check no one was trying to mess with my head....

Here is the kiln program I used:

100 ⁰C/hr → 550 ⁰C → Pass hrs
Full ⁰C/hr → 880 ⁰C → 11.00 hrs
(held longer to try to get rid of bubbles)
Full ⁰C/hr → 520 ⁰C → 15.00hrs
10 ⁰C/hr → 300 ⁰C → Pass
20 ⁰C/hr → 100 ⁰C → Pass
End

And here is how the piece looked when int came out the kiln:

After looking at this piece I'm starting to lean towards using coloured casting billets to get a consistent colouring throughout the piece, but I could still use copper oxide with the billets to add a bit more colour and detail to the pieces. Not sure yet though, especially as I have moved on to make my forms with a mixture of surface textures.


Gelflex Mould

In my last post I had started to develop a plaster modal with a mixture of curvy flowing surface to contrast the geometric form. I have decided that I want to see how this will look in glass so I flatted off the straight edges but hand laping the plaster against a sheet of sand blasted sheet glass and used sand paper to smooth out the curvy surface ready to make a gelflex mould of it.
When setting up my piece of plaster I sat my piece of plaster on a rolled out sheet of clay and cut around it to leave me with a bit of over flow when pouring wax after the gelflex is made and it will provide the overflow for my investment moulds. When I was waiting for the gelflex to melt I used a spray bottle to keep the plaster damp so the plaster doesn't stick to the gelflex.
The gelflex I used for this mould was my old one I had for making brothers for Sven, and after that had been melted it didn't look like i would have enough so I managed to find out an old gelflex that I had forgotten about to cut in to tiny chunks to put into the melting pot. I started heating the gelflex at 150⁰C but it was taking a long time for the gelflex to start melting even with the lid on so I turned it up to 165⁰C that seemed to work a lot better. It took around 2hrs to melt completely. When the gelfex had melted I turned off the pot and left it for just over 30mins and stirred it regularly. I think I may have poured it a little too soon there were a few bubbles rising to the surface, especially near where the point at the top of the plaster is. I usually leave gelflex to cool for around 45mins but in some of my moulds haven't picked up all the detail and there have been streaks in the gelflex, this is why I poured it earlier.
Didn't seem like too bad a mould but I'll have to wait until the mould has cooled completely so I can take the plaster out and have a look, and then I can go on to make a wax from it and see how my new form will look in glass. This wont be my final piece, it's just a test to see how the contrasting surfaces work together. I really want to see how the curves look when looking through the glass on the other side of the piece.
Also really proud because Mark our plaster technician (and a legend) commented on how beautiful the piece was *Happy Kimi*


Random Photo

Can't remember taking this photo, but I really like it...

"Hello Feet"

Week 1 (Week Begining 25/01/10)

Casting Architectural Forms

For this new semester I have decided to carry on with some of the work I started last semester and expand upon what I have already done and taking my inspiration from architectural forms (in particular new and modern architecture like the work of Zara Hadid)
In the first semester I started using the band saw in the plaster room to make shapes cause I was having trouble modeling in card and wasn't able to accurately draw the shapes in my sketch book. After spending some time practicing on the band saw I came up with a couple of shapes I was happy with.
Above is the shape I was most pleased with. After flattening off the sides by using water and hand lapping the plaster against a sheet of sandblasted glass I soaked the plaster ready to make a gel flex mould of it. When the mould had cooled completely I poured wax into the mould and to make a wax duplicate of my plaster model in order to do a lost wax cast. The wax I made was hollowed out so that it wouldn't take too long to get the wax out of the cast (this is where I left off with this piece last semester). On the Tuesday of the first week I made the investment mould for the piece using a mixture of plaster (1.2kg), silica (1.2kg), HT (800g) and water (just over 2lts). When the mould had hardened I cleaned it up and removed the wax (because the wax was hollow I didn't bother steaming it and scraped out a bit of the wax and the rest I was able to just pull out of the mould. The mould was left a few days in the drying cupboard for it to dry completely.

Using a displacement test I found that I would need about 500ml of glass to fill the mould, so I measured out a little more than 500ml of Glasma Glass (from the hot shop) just in case. I then put the glass into a flower pot because the glass wouldn't all fit into the mould. Before putting the glass onto the mould I sieved some copper oxide onto the mould to give the glass a blue colour (this is also carrying on from some of the work I did last semester). I then rested the flower pot on top of some kiln shelf wrapped in ceramic fiber paper so if there is too much glass and the kiln shelf and the glass touch there wont be a compatibility problem.

When I was happy with how everything was set up in the kiln I shut the kiln and set it for a full cast. This is the program I used:

100 ⁰C/hr → 550 ⁰C → Pass hrs
Full ⁰C/hr → 880 ⁰C → 10.00 hrs
Full ⁰C/hr → 530 ⁰C → Pass
10 ⁰C/hr → 520 ⁰C → 11.00 hrs
10 ⁰C/hr → 300 ⁰C → Pass
20 ⁰C/hr → 100 ⁰C → Pass
End

The kiln was set on 29/01/10 I will post an image of how the piece comes out when the program is complete.

Carrying On

I starter on a piece last semester and I wasn't able to completely finish it in time for hand in so this week I have spent some time on it trying to get it polished.

The piece was a lot taller but there were cracks and I didn't want them to run through the rest of the piece. I managed to get a good polish with pumice on the polishing wheel but because of the shape its going to take some time to get to a high polish. There are also some chips in the piece and a large concave area where there was a crack in the mould so the glass much have flowed out as it was cooling, I have been thinking about using the diamond wheel to smooth down these area so they look better and are easier to polish. I was intending to enter this piece to the warm glass award but the lack of technicians has meant I haven't been able to have much time in the cold work shop.

Hot Work

On the Friday afternoon I made a seconded wax of the shape in casting architectural forms, and when I was waiting for it to cool I had planned to do some polishing but no one was in to keep an eye on the cold work shop so I decided to go and do some work in the hot shop, not really aiming to make anything just wanted to practice shaping and see if I could still manage working with hot glass. I took a few gathers but didn't do any blowing because I had a cold sore, so spent a lot of time shaping and re-heating the glass. I didn't keep the piece in the end because I didn't fancy paying for it and it didn't seem very relevant to my work. But after having a chat with Simon (the hot glass technician) about my work he suggested doing hot casts of the plaster pieces I had already made. I haven't done any hot casting before so Simon said he would help me on Monday afternoon to see if I was interested in incorporating it in to my work.