Glass Design Blog

 

 

Today was my final couple of workshops at  Tarleton Academy. Its been a fun few weeks working with many, many students in years 7, 8, 9 and 10. The quantity of work produced has been astonishing and has given me such rich source material to work from.

For these sessions we worked with the cyanotype prints produced in earlier workshops, along with the wire drawings, copying them onto sheets of acetate and tracing paper. The students then used these to create new laminated pieces developing on from the earlier ones using just flat colour.

The glass laminating process is one which I will be using in the production of the windows, so an immediate and relevant process for the students to use.

 

 

For the next series of workshops at Tarleton Academy, I wanted the students to work with light in a different way. By using light sensitive paper, the students were able to print drawings and objects onto paper exposed to a UV light (which I would usually use to bond glass to glass with UV glue), creating blueprints.

Firstly we created wire drawings, mainly figures and flower motifs. I wanted these to offer a different line quality to contrast the bold cut outs which had been seen over the last few workshops. The students combined these drawings with found objects from the art room, fabrics and natural material. They tested out their compositions on paper before transferring the pieces onto the print paper.

 

The paper was exposed to the UV light and then soaked in a water tray and left to dry. As the paper dried the colour blue intensified, creating some wonderful imagery.

The next workshop sessions we will use this new imagery to create further laminated windows, printing it onto trace and acetate.

 

 

More workshops took place this week at Tarleton Acadamy, as part of my ongoing work for the Chapel Gallery!

We begun to investigate the theme of silhouettes further using architectural forms gathered from the gallery, rather than the figures we looked at last week.

I am really pleased with the body of work beginning to take shape. Lovely sense of layering and framing starting to develop using our primary source material from the Chapel Gallery. Some students re-worked their collages from the first workshop at the gallery, others used elements as a starting point. Repetition of forms and shapes are creating some interesting rhythmic patterns. Wonderful bold flat colour contrasting with some sophisticated media handling – great stuff!

 

Next week we will be starting to take our ideas off paper and introducing transparency, translucency and opacity to our work. Watch this space…………