May I: The decanting

“Marge, she’s at it again and it’s only 7 AM,” he groaned, peering blearily out the window, “She’s doing that thing with the waterpik. On the back deck in her bathrobe. And fuzzy pink slippers.”

“Harry, she’s an artist. Artists are weird. Go back to sleep.”

OK, so my neighbors aren’t named Harry and Marge, they’re undoubtedly up and about long before 7am, and although they do give me some wary looks now and then, they’re far too nice to say anything about squirting glass with a waterpik.  And the fuzzy pink slippers were the first ones handy when I ran for the kiln this morning.

Who cares? Castuary is over and May-the-first is out!

“Castuary” is that anxiety-ridden period between shoving a mold full of glass in the kiln and lifting the lid to find out if you’ve made heaven or hell. The end of May’s first Castuary is a bit of both, mostly heaven but the kiln gods threw in a bit of pate de verre hell for fun. It’s just enough to keep me from swooning with delight because, by George, I think I’ve (mostly) got it.

Just in case you haven’t been following this series of posts (and, frankly, you’d have to be a pate de verre addict to want to), over the last few months I’ve been documenting the progress of May, a deep bas-relief sculpture based on a lady I met in a nursing home. May (not her real name) has Alzheimer’s disease and, in between bouts of longing for her children, is furious at what’s happening to her. If you’re interested in starting from the beginning, here’s the whole series:

• The inspiration for the sculpture “May”
• The constructing of May’s clay model
• The making of a silicone mold of May
• Planning May’s mold
• Making May’s mold
• Packing May’s mold
• Decanting May’s test run (this post)
  
• May the second (final version)
• Taking the girls for a stroll

It’s been a long journey, as much to achieve reproducibility in a difficult medium as to actually finish the work, and there were lots of tests and experiments along the way. It’s not over yet: This is only May’s test run. I’ll be rebuilding the mold and doing most of this over to get to the final, ready-for-display May. Even so, I didn’t take any short cuts with this one, and so I (im)patiently waited for the glass to completely cool before running down like a maniac this morning to end Castuary.

APOLOGIES FOR SUCH A LONG, RAMBLING POST: I thought it’d be interesting to record my post-mortem on what worked and what didn’t. (Actually, if I really recorded it, this would be the size of a paperback novel–what follows is merely a synopsis). But it’ll be long, boring slogging for most of you. Sorry about that.

Opened the kiln, immediately saw the first hell: The sides had come down in places. This is a constant danger with huge, deep pate de verre pieces like this one. May’s hair has near-vertical sides–go too far with the heatwork and the glass will slide merrily toward the bottom. Too little heatwork, however, and the thicker parts of the sculpture won’t sinter, i.e., will stay as crumbly particles of frit.

Drat.

On the other hand, slipped sides are eminently fixable in a corrective firing, so it’s not a permanent hell. It DOES tell me that I probably need to revise my talc assessments or my glass-tamping–I’d assumed that this mold didn’t need a talc filler to keep the glass in place, and I was wrong. I’ll avoid talc wherever possible because it nearly triples the heatwork requirements and is nasty stuff to get off the glass. Unless I can improve my vertical packing, though, there’s talc in my future.

I started removing the investment and got my first taste of heaven: The spent mold lifted off like a dream. That meant I’d gotten the investment mix right and, further, that minimizing steamout probably worked.

The ideal casting mold is one that holds like iron during firing, then crumbles and falls away once cooled, and that’s exactly what this one did. May’s face is smooth, almost glossy, and will require minimal cleanup.

Score 1 for me.

There’s a little scum on the background surface, easily removed with a little scrubbing or some 600-grit wet/dry sandpaper, but the background is solid, level, flat, perfect. The sheet glass inclusion worked like a dream. I’ve got a bit of a demarcation where I split the sheets with the diamond saw (dumb, dumb) but I’ll know better next time.

That’s 2 for me.

Assessing the face

Whoa–the face color is perfect, almost too realistic. The Light Peach Cream/Crystal Clear powder combination has taken tints perfectly and remained transparent enough to let the undertints come through. I could probably pull back on the Medium Amber in the undertint, it’s a little too warm, dark and lively for an old lady locked in a nursing home, but it works. I think I’ve found the perfect recipe for realistic PdV flesh tones.

The surface powder is also just about perfect, very thin near the eyes and deeper crevices, letting the darker tints show through. The tip of the nose is possibly a little too opaque, but not overly so. I’ve finally got the lip tint down to barely visible. Great.

Score, oh, 10 for me on the face.

And, for all those folk out there who wonder how come I’m not using bronze…refer to the picture above. That face is translucent, i.e., it’s sucking in the available light and shooting it out the front. It literally glows. THIS is why we do this in pate de verre.

The hair is a too dark, partly because the black sheet rim slid and is back-tinting my careful grey-white-lavender frit mixing. Tad too much blue-grey opal and, dammit, it’s blotching. What IS it about greys? It’s not bad, it’s just not right. And the grey of the eyebrows looks more like a stripe, not a scanty fringe of hair.

I lose a point  there.

Changing the nose construction worked–May has flared nostrils, the worst kind for slipping, and these mostly held. The darker layer 3 with its Medium Amber is showing through a bit on one side, but it actually accents the age of the face. Still, I need better control, probably by keeping layer 3 out of the nose field entirely.

I took a gamble around the eyes that paid off–normally I dust a little dusty lilac powder or violet striker powder in the hollow between the nose and eyes, to bring out the dark shadows and bags that none of us admit we have. In this case, I suspected the dark layer 3 would be enough, and it was. I may still do a little purple in the final version–it will make the eyes look angrier.

The eyes, now…they mostly worked although there’s a bit of a chunky gap where the French Vanilla powder wasn’t perfectly packed. And the FV may be a little too white for an old lady, although it does make the blue of the eyes stand out. And I purely love the effect of the transparent frit ball.

In fact, I’m thinking it may be wise to cast the entire eye, iris, whites and all, as an inclusion with a larger, flatter frit ball that also engulfs the iris. Must experiment a bit with that.

Score 3 for the eyes.

Now for a BIG failure: The neck area. It’s supposed to fade smoothly into the black background, but it looks more like a goiter than anything else. Yuck. I see the problem: the black isn’t overtaking the face powder the way I thought it might. I suspect that the best way to fix this is to just put black powder onto the neck area in the first place and use the face color only on May’s “wattles,” so that they appear to be growing out of the dark.

Minus 3 points for not figuring that out ahead of time.

Assessing the background
The sheet-glass-as-inclusion idea was absolutely a success. The background is flat, perfect, bubble-free and yet I have 3mm of clear glass I can grind through or carve as needed. Behind it, the frit is absolutely saturated. And it’s worked so well I won’t even have much edge-grinding to get things smooth. This idea works.

Score 3 on the background…but take away 2 for the gaps in the side.

I’d put what I call “conceits,” or hidden color touches, throughout the solid black background, hoping it would relieve the plastic-looking industrial black. It did, but I was a bit too successful. The black didn’t overtake the midnight blue transparent nearly enough, and the prison bars stand out too much. They should be almost illusory, invisible unless you know where to look, but these wind up looking more like cartoon wallpaper. I did get exactly the little touches of fire I wanted from the Pimento Red sifting, however, so that’s a plus.

Minus 1 point on that.

So…overall, I figure I’m ahead by 12 points. May is definitely on the right track. Whew.

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