More, better, coasters!

Here are a few photos of some more recent coasters I have made as gifts and to sell. I have used inclusions in these coasters, which I have never used before in coaster form, however I loved the effects it created from the experiments I did last year so I thought I would try it, and they've worked out really well!

This particular coaster (above) has copper leaf, silver leaf, gold leaf, brass sheet, copper tape, and even part of a Ferrero Rocher wrapper trapped inside two pieces of glass.

I love the unpredictability of the materials, as different things happen to them depending whether they're overlapped, and what in particular they're overlapped with.

Because of this, it can be hard to identify which material is which after it has been fired, because they change in appearance so dramatically!

Also, I have bought an engraver for me to sign my work, woo!

End of First Year

As I have now started my second year, I thought I should finish off the blogs from last year and show what I did for my final piece. My last brief was based on Protrait and Identity, and I was primarily looking at the idea of subtlety in faces, and not necessarily at first glance identifying a face in an image. Because of this, I was looking at the work of Francis Bacon, and taking the abstraction of faces from his work.

To begin with I drew some of his paintings in my own style of drawing, and from these I decided to try and incorporate the spontaneous mark-making I had created.

To do this I decided to create layered pieces which included a multiple of techniques such as sandblasting, engraving and UV Bonding, as well as screen printing (look at previous blog!).

These are the results-

This is how I arranged my pieces to be exhibited.

I had also done 3 layered pieces with White Opal Flash Glass (clear glass with a thin layer of white glass on the surface which can be sandblasted through to create interesting effects). These were done solely with sandblasing and engraving, and I really liked these until I added the coloured glass panels at the back.

I did this because these were some of the colours Bacon had used in his paintings. However now I think it takes away from the simplicity of the clear and flash glass.