Leafbowl

Been working on this one for awhile, and it’s in the kiln for final firing (I hope) tonight. This is an experiment with clay and natural substances (leaves) using Luminar Mold Mix 6.

Essentially, I’m trying to create the illusion of a face peeking out of a pile of leaves in pate de verre. I want to capture as much subtle detail as possible, and also experiment with tinting clear and white frits to see just how much range I can get out of a very few combinations of fine frit and powdered glass.

Making the mold has been interesting and rather messy. I’m working with live (and sometimes buggy) leaves over the course of days or weeks, and keeping them fresh and uncurled has been something of a hassle. Getting the MM6 off the clay hasn’t been fun, either.

Finished the first mold a couple of weeks ago, discovered that the colloidal alumina silica I’ve been using with Castalot seems to crystalize on the surface, necessitating some grinding to get it off. That obviously would destroy the fine detail.

Did the second mold and used a kilnwash mix, rapidly dumped in and out of the mold, as a release. Worked very well as a release (no surprise there) but the kilnwash filled in all the detail. Some I recarved into the wash itself, but I don’t fancy redoing everything. Much of the detail was simply gone.

So for this third attempt I ordered boron nitride spray as a last resort, and we’ll see how that works. Did the initial (clear) cast to get the transparency I wanted in the face:

Then mixed my frit mixes this afternoon and started packing the mold using homemade carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) in a paste (yes, yes, this time I’m using a glass paste instead of dry frit, primarily because of the steep sides of the mold). Finished at about 11pm, pulled the two halves of the mold together and sealed them, then weighted them down. There’s about 5 pounds of frit inside (feels like it, anyway), and I’ve weighted the top of the mold to ensure a good bond.

So….crossing my fingers. We’ll see just how good boron nitride is as a release, whether or not there’s sufficient weight on the inside mold to push the glass out instead of the other way around (thereby making a puddle in the bottom) and…we’ll see.

Wish me luck.

8/21/2006…so much for luck. Almost everything went beautifully…mold held, detail was fantastic, all the color samples I mixed paid off in exactly the tones I wanted…but almost is a bad idea in pate de verre.

Boron nitride, or at least the way I applied boron nitride in this type of mold, sucks as a kiln release. I got an almost perfect melding of glass and mold on the underside (the “outside” of the glass bowl), and somewhere during cooling about six cracks developed. What I’ve got now are extremely attractive shards.

–sigh–

That’s life, folks. Back to the drawing board.

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