Experimenting

Last spring I took a silk screen class with Gail Stouffer at her new studio, Roadhouse Art. On the last day of class, Gail introduced a.new a technique called "rusting" using iron oxide and a silk screen. I was intrigued by the the metal and the end  result of the little project we did on paper, so I ordered some and finally did my first experiment.

I mixed the iron oxide with water and painted it on my Tekta glass. I allowed it to dry and tac fused it in the kiln.

The interesting part was that in this experiment, it did not "rust", The color remained black, and with just a tac fuse the texture of iron is still there, solidly there.

I will be running a few more experiments using a solution to "rust" the iron before firing. Then I will see how the tac fuse does capped with a full fuse,. Wondering how many bubbles will there be......

So here is my first experiment with iron oxide and glass. Just to make it more interesting,  I painted a sunset background in acrylic on canvas and added the glass in the shadow box frame. The clear glass is muted because I added clear powder frit over the entire piece of glass before firing.

I picked up 5 sheets of Tekta this past weekend form Helios glass so I am looking forward to many more experiments!!

(I will be working on my drawing skills too!)