Painted Page 1

Whoo Hoo... Glass painting! Bronwen Heilman taught me the techniques!

Find her work on ghostcow.com.  You can see my work* HERE * 

2 x .75"

I've never actually seen this, but a friend tells me there are places you can go where you plop down buck and they give you a big hammer and little mechanical critters pop out of holes and if you hit enough of em you get a stuffed animal prize.  I've GOTTA find one of these places! 

I made this one in the class and was pretty excited when I finally got to see it - this was my first successful painted bead, with six PDogs's circling around.  I didn't mess around doing anything fancy with the background, was just hoping to get a good painting out of it!  

2 x .875" (that's 7/8")   and     2 x 1.25"

hmmm...I'll need to come up with a good name for this.  These are the 2nd & 3rd attempts at a landscape bead using my prairie dog paintings.  Why is it so much easier to get a new technique to work in front of the teacher and other students, but as soon as you try it on your own glass blows all over the studio?  So far, messing with this stuff has earned me 7 pretty good burns in places we won't go into here, but the glass sure did! 

$250

2.375 x 1"

(that's 2  3/8")

This is made from a raccoon painting I did in class - I'd brought along the dozens of face, body, and leg sketches that I'm gonna use for the mix n' match beads, and thought I'd try one of the designs in paint. Turned out really well, except for a few gnarly spots.  Since I do a lot of sculptural relief surface decoration on my mural beads, I combined techniques and covered all the iffy bits with raised 3-D leaves and branches.  Worked so well I'm going to have surface work on all of these from now on - covering Evil with Additional Pattern and Design is a definite Keeper Technique!  It worked for the fish below, too... 

$250

2 x 1.25"

When I think about how my wrist felt after painting this stinker, I should call it Carpal Tunnel!  I did two fish paintings, and made the first one into this bead;  the second one's in the picture on the left.  Neither of these had tails because I wanted the fish to be coming out of a really thick mess o' seaweed.  If I'd painted the tail the image would have wrapped all the way around the bead, with the tail overlapping the face.  The strategy worked really well - will have to get a picture of the other side of the bead to put up here, it looks great! 

This is the 1st Advance Scout of the Hamster Earth Invasion Force - they're gonna be mighty unhappy when they discover that Minneapolis is the *ONLY* city built like a Habitrail!    I can't believe this turned out - it's huge, and it's the one painted image I didn't want to mess up.  There's a really high mortality rate doing this stuff - the glass is painted & fired several times, not too many problems there, but then it has to be applied to the base bead in the flame, and that's when most of them blow straight down my shirt.....  Gonna wear this everywhere! 

This almost turned out, and I'm gonna make more!  This is a very thin shaped tabular bead, and the hole is horizontal, just above the headlight & taillight.  Next time I'm gonna make large lights, position them higher, and run the hole thru em.  It doesn't show in the pic but the dog is inset with a nice thick casing of clear over the top, and there are treads on the tires.  I don't think he has a license...

$145

2 x 1.25"

One that turned out... gonna make more of these, with different critters looking over the wall.  And I'll turn it into a fence (will I have to change the name? hmmm...  Cat Giving A Fence? Social Climber? Board Stiff?  ackkk.....)  Think I'll lose the sun, stick in clouds instead, maybe a tree, and define the fence boards more precisely using thin lines of darker rust, and there'll be a lot more flowers climbing up the sides and back.  Gonna make a few in this series, I like it! 

2 x 1.25" 

Another one with potential - but next time it'll be way more complicated - I'm going to paint the barn and silo in the background, apply it to the base bead, encase the whole thing in clear, then put the pig on and cover the whole mess with grass, trees, and flowers.  It's gonna be a 2 hour exercise in stress & panic on the torch, and that's not counting all the hours needed to prep all the painted pieces.  ack....

2.25 x 1.25"

This one *didn't* turn out, darnitall.  The black outline paint messed up, spread and thinned out when it was fired, so I just slapped it into a mess-around bead to see what I could do with it.  I'd thought to have it sticking out the skylight of a VW bug or a circus train, but the giraffe was too big, it would have taken a 4" bead to complete the image (no, no...) So I put it on a landscape and tried to make it look like it was peeking from the top of a tree.  Might give it another try, and take more time with the leaves & trunk - it has potential.