May the second

May the second came out of the kiln this week. My first thought, on seeing her, was “Yuck.” She was too dark, too mellow, too hard, too fat-headed, not enough neck…just yuck. Then she kinda grew on me.

Her twin sister, the test run (below), now looks a little too bewildered and blank. May’s still not perfect, and there’s quite a bit of work to do on her before she’s gallery-able…but I think we’re about there. (And in any case, I’m getting bloody sick of her, so it’s time to move on)

I’ll just finish up the series, and give it a rest. So…changed several things to fix problems in the first May; I angled the hair and generally sloped the face a bit more off vertical to help keep the glass up (which makes her look a bit wider and more squarish). I also modified the firing schedule to sinter the frit together at slightly lower temperature and help keep the glass on the sides. And I greatly lightened the hair; it’s mostly crystal clear with some translucent white and blue-gray opal (not much) thrown in.

I also tried a different technique for the eye, this time using an inclusion of clear thin sheet for the iris, backing it with a clear frit ball and topping that with some black powder, then covering the whole iris area in BE midnight blue. It worked but was difficult to control since the sheet was flat and the eyeball curved–I’m discovering that significant features such as eyes really need to be cast separately and combined in the final mold. Tiny changes in the eye make a huge difference in the final piece, so I’ll take the extra step with the next sculpture.

I still like the eyes on this one. Even more, though, I like the return to dark purple shadows way behind the eye area–very moody here.

I moved up the neck with black powder, hoping to better blend the “wattles” into the background. It was mostly successful, but I think went TOO far–the wattles look a bit too much like crab legs.

Background-wise, I really pushed hard to keep the texture of the glass–a sheet of “Furious” (i.e., second) Crystal Clear–in the final piece. BE glass tends not to be perfectly smooth and flat anyway, since it’s hand-rolled, and I specifically looked for interesting textures and crackle when I went through the seconds bin. The question will be, as I start coldworking this piece, how much of that texture I actually retain.

There’s always one nasty discovery when you open the kiln, and in this case it was my own daggone fault. I used up all my BE Stiff Black frit on May I, so headed down to the BE Resource Center for more. The background on these portraits requires about seven pounds of frit, and I have a number of portraits coming up, so I decided on the convenient 40-lb tub. Bit cheaper, I don’t wind up with 8 empty frit jars for recycling, and those square 40-lb tubs come in really handy for scrap glass and investment additives.

BE doesn’t stock 40-lb tubs of Stiff Black in any frit size; they did, however, have a 40-lb tub of coarse regular black. I’m sure that on a weekday they would have been more than happy to fill up a tub or two with Stiff Black, but it was Saturday and I didn’t want to wait. It’s background, it’s behind a sheet glass inclusion: What difference could using regular black in place of stiff possibly make?

Er. Did you know there’s a reason they call it STIFF Black? Sigh.

Regular black is NOT stiff and it ran like bad pantyhose down into the face area. Damn. May’s hair, a translucent white, now has a vertical black stripe.

It’s not visible from the front and in any case there are ways to fix it, fortunately, even if they’re time-consuming. I can pull the black back with an outer coating of Dense White or even grind back some of the black to lighten things up–but it’s a pain when the rest of the piece came out so well. And it dragged at the rest of the color a bit, so there’s some offset.

Lesson here: investigate either using stiff black near the face, reducing heatwork still more, or making the background out of strips of stiff black sheet glass. But don’t ever dump 7 pounds of goopy black in there…

Soooo…bit of coldwork, refire to fix that little skunk hair problem and I need to mount the hanging hardware, but May is pretty much over. Now to start on the next portrait…

All in all, this has been a good exercise (in both learning and frustration), and I’m pretty happy with the outcome.

By the way, if you want to read the entire series of posts about this sculpture, from concept to this post, here you go:

• 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
• May the second (final version–this post)
• Taking the girls for a stroll

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