Artist Demonstration - Glass Fusion with Alysa Diebolt

[Music] my [Music] [Music] [Music] hi my name is alyssa deibolt and i am a fused glass artist i live in east point and i'm also a board member for the anton arts center i'm so excited to be featured as an artist spotlight for super sad art day 2021 so fused glass is the process of melting glass together in a kiln so for my fused glass projects everything that i make starts with a piece of quarter inch thick clear base glass so you just saw me bring in a sheet that i buy it is two foot by four foot long so it's the largest size that you can buy and i buy them a crate at a time usually has between 20 and 30 pieces in the glass crate and weighs several thousand pounds so the first tool we're going to talk about is um a glass cutter so glass is a really tough material but the one thing that's definitely tougher than glass i can use to cut it and cut it intentionally into the shape or angles or curves that you're looking for is diamond so all of the glass cutters that glass artists use whether they're fused glass artists like me or stained glass artists like my dad they are using a diamond blade on the end of the handle so we're going to snap it and that's it that one little cut is going to be able to cut this it's a 12 inch slice off this piece of glass so this is a pretty cool trick not everyone likes to do this but i think it's pretty fun i think it it shows a level of control and understanding of working with glass especially really thick glass like i use so the line is right here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to pull this glass towards me i can see the line that i cut and real quick here i'm going to lift up and snap down and the glass should break right where i cut it just like that so now this 12 inch by 24 inch rectangle i am going to cut down to a 12 inch square i'm going to do the same thing snap it's pretty fun i think all right i'm gonna move this big sheet out of the way i'm not using it and it's just gonna be in my way so this is one of the stands that i was talking about they come in circles they come in rectangles this is i would call this a diamond so i buy all of these stand stock from the supplier i buy a ton of them at a time and then i just make the glass to fit the stand so i know the angles and all that and then i can decorate it basically however i want and then that is the finished piece with the intention of it's more of an art piece and less of a functional piece so i know poppies are super popular so we're gonna do that sometimes these stickers leave a little bit of residue so the residue can actually cause problems in the kiln the sharpie does not but sticker adhesive and residue can [Music] so again it's going to be on an angle it's going to be on that slant so when i make my poppy pieces which i'm kind of known for i guess um i like to do a blue sky so the cool thing about transparent glass is it might be really really impossibly difficult for you guys to see but i can see through the glass and see how long this needs to be so i don't you know the way i function is i don't i know that my glass is 12 inches cool great but i also know like you can eyeball this and it'll still turn out pretty great so one of the cool things about fuse glass is it's pretty forgiving pretty flexible so i know that that fits up absolutely perfectly so that is great i think i'm going to try to use this piece so i'm being more efficient with my glass usage so i love doing a super bright blue for the sky a yellow for sunshine and then some green for the grass and then we'll i'll show you how i make my poppies and how it all comes together in this awesome scene that is just very happy so new tool this one will be better so these are called grosers grozers are basically a plier um but you'll see that this part is flat on the inside and then this is curved so what you do with a grozer is i can see my line here i do my flat part on top right up to my line and then i basically just push my elbow down because this is really thin it's going to break off in a lot of pieces because it doesn't have the like structural to come off in one nice flat piece sometimes that's pretty annoying but i do save all of these little pieces that i'm creating i do save them all and you'll see how i use them later on in this project so that was over here so how much green do we want because this piece has some funkiness to it so cool so we actually only need to chop off this little corner so we're going to go back in with the grozers all right let's trim up this green so yeah i really like to use that clear base glass as like my template because i know that you know even if it is a 12 inch square maybe it's like a 12 inch square plus just like the tiniest little bit that's going to be really annoying throughout this process so what i like to do is just match my decor decorative glass the colored sheet glass to the clear because then i know it's going to fit so i'm going to do this one a little differently i'm not going to just bash it with my knuckles so then it snaps so that i can show you the other tool that i use all the time okay so i have my line these are called running pliers running pliers are also basically pliers they do have little silicone protectors because metal on glass sometimes is a little too aggressive so they use these little silicone protectors so these um the shape of there there is some curve to the inside but with this one you go parallel with your line instead of the grossers where you go perpendicular you just line up about the middle of the pliers with your line and you just squeeze them together and it just flings down basically and then this little bit because my glass was shaped a little funky i'll take the grossers and follow up and even though that is like super not perfect you won't even build top which is pretty neat so we're gonna flip this so we've got grass we've got sunshine and we've got blue skies poppies come in all sorts of different colors but i have found that my customers only like lipstick red poppies so that is the title of this glass um glass colors are not nearly as fun as like paint chip colors where they come in like really fun names or like the names of crayons and markers and stuff uh glass is pretty much like cobalt blue pale amber green but the red is lipstick red so that one's fun so what i do from these weird strips and it doesn't really matter that this broke terribly is i make really rough squares triangles rectangles whatever so these are called mosaic nippers and they're really popular for mosaics you can actually get some even at like the hardware store because uh folks use them for ceramic tiles too so poppies are pretty simple make sure try to get them into the container sometimes they don't so now we kind of compose the piece so again we see that cross in the middle that x so we want to make sure to not do the entire design based off that center and i like to do a big one kind of like largish so i like to do odd numbers i love a five love a five for a cn piece of this size for some of my smaller pieces i'll only do three but i love a five for this piece so the center of a poppy is typically black and kind of speckly a little bit so what i do so i know i like these five uh poppy flowers i just do a little bit of liquid glue make sure it's kind of organic shaped and makes sense for the size of the flower so i made that big one a little bit bigger so this is called frit we're gonna get deeper into what frit is in a second but i don't want this glue to dry oops so i dump off the extra it's exactly like glitter basically where you just want it where the glue is so we've got our big one our large one large medium little guy so now some of what they call accessory glass accessory glass is just small stuff basically this is stuff that i do have to buy comes in these long skinny tubes so these are called noodle and stringer noodle is very similar to fettuccine and stringer is very similar to angel hair pasta you can kind of see the size difference there so my iconic look is so i line up my diamond make sure that the top point matches the bottom point pretty well make sure my base is straight so i don't want to go off the edge and i do want the top of the noodle just a hair underneath the poppy flower these are super thin so you can totally pop them with your hands you don't need any special tools or anything they don't need to come all the way down it's a little bit abstract you know this is a field you know i do try to make sure that all of the ends don't end at the same point because i just think it looks better oops all right that's cool i save all the little bits and pieces like that one in jars and use them for future projects so i've got all my stems for the poppies put the extra one away so i save this i don't uh i like to keep all my half pieces somewhere else not in my main drawer so then these are i just use as like grass or like leaves and greenery in these scenes so you don't have to measure nearly as much you can pop these with your hands also kind of try to get them like a little bit up and down but not as specific because it's kind of like they're kind of like the stems from the bottom of the the poppies but not exactly okay that they're rolling around because we will be adding a lot of other glass that will help stabilize them so we're gonna put away the stringer so now i'm gonna get some frit frit is broken up glass it comes in three different sizes so to show you what frit is i'm gonna dump out a couple different kinds so we won't be using it for this piece but it'll show you so this is dark gray coarse so you can see it's like kind of like small pebbles a little bit this is dark gray medium so it's like really fine it's like bigger than sand but smaller than pebbles and then this is fine and what i did here is there's actually a bunch of different grays mixed together so it's going to come out as the really pale gray because the darker is a little bit further down but we're really just trying to show you the size so fine is absolutely like sand so i love coarse sprit i just think it adds a lot so i'm going to be using a pale blue so this is cobalt so i'm going to be using pale blue and you'd think you wouldn't see it but what ends up happening is it almost very similar to watercolor it kind of waters down the color a little and i do add it to the yellow sometimes i don't like dumping coarse directly on because it can be a little volatile because then it just adds different variations because sometimes this glass can be a little boring because it's just one flat color it's super consistent nothing's too crazy about it so this green so i used like a normal kelly green so i'm going to add some olive green and it's also transparent i'm not going to get it way up into the sky and share it all around like i did the others but just gives it makes it a little bit more interesting and then yellow so it's a brighter shade so this is a pale amber and this is like a true yellow transparent so this will make pops of like brighter spots kind of and because frit is not like little circles it's not any real specific shape you know sometimes you can discern a rectangle or a triangle out of it but it's not um as structured they kind of just end up looking like little blobs which is kind of nice that's much more organic looking and then my most favorite thing to do is to add clear now what clear does if you've ever seen like church glass windows where it kind of just looks like a little bit speckly or it's called mottled and or it looks like watercolor especially if you like do a little spritz of water from like a spray bottle it does that and it's just the coolest feature so that was a layer of course for it now we're going to add some medium so this is where you can get a little bit funky because it's so much less concentrated so it just adds a lot of dimension so this is teal transparent deep aqua which is kind of similar to the teal the teal has a little bit more green in it so when these things start rolling around like that i usually just find a piece or two a fret to help keep it in space now here so when you see poppies especially you know that wizard of oz look it's always like a field of poppies so what i like to come in and do is this is a red mix it has some dark red and some of that lipstick red so i really like to drop that all over a bit haphazardly like i said poppies come in a lot of different colors so i like to add in some orange and then a little bit of opal lime because of all the little petals and leaves that are with all of the poppies that we kind of sprinkled out everywhere so the only real cleanup that i like to do is i like to make sure that the poppies don't have any of that frit on it because i think it can look a little funky sometimes i make sure that there's no like blues or the red even sometimes it can be tricky to get it out of that center so it looks like everything is good to go [Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: antonartcenter

Views: 10,021

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Id: Zk7eg6-bfAY

Length: 26min 19sec (1579 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 12 2021