Here is my process for making a fruit.  In this case, I am making a peach.

Starting with a point (See my earlier blog entry on “points”), I heat and add layers and layers of a variety of colored glass powders to get a natural, rich peach color.   Heating and rolling the point in the glass powder builds up the colors, and when I am satisfied, I blow into the point to produce the peach shape and I remove one of the point handles and melt and smooth the spot where I’ve taken it off.  

Next comes the crease down the peach.  I create the crease using a regular table knife.

 Now I have to put a tiny hole in the back of the peach.  As I continue working on the peach, heating and cooling it, the air trapped inside will expand and contract.  The hole allows the expanding and contracting air to move in and out of the peach.  If I don’t leave a hole, the peach will either collapse or expand and pop out where I heat it the hottest.  

Next I place the hot peach into a grabber tool so I can remove the other handle and complete the peach.  I melt and smooth the side where the second handle was, and I use a colored glass rod to attach a stem, taking care to meld together the rod and the peach for a smooth seam. 

Finally the peach is placed in the kiln for annealing.  I will write about annealing in another blog entry. 

Once I have all the fruits, leaves and branches completed I then make the actual sculpture.   

People often ask how I get the colors into my art.  Do I paint them on?

No, I don’t paint my pieces.  The color is glass in a variety of forms…

• Glass Powders

For fruits, leaves, seed pods or any blown parts, I apply layers of colored glass powder.  The powder can be bought in a wonderful palette of colors from several vendors, and I just order over the internet. The powder is sold in a range of grits from a fine talcum powder texture to the size of salt or sugar granules. 

To apply the glass powders, I heat the point (see my blog post on March 10 to learn about “points”) then roll it in the glass powder.  Because the point is slightly molten, the glass powder adheres to the surface.  After building up several layers, I then add layers of other colors with sifters, giving the surface a mottled, organic appearance. 

• Frits

Frits are little chunks of colored glass.  Like the powders, frits are available in various sizes, small to large.  Large frit chunks are approximately 2mm in diameter.  I use frits to color my branches.  I start with a clear glass rod, heat it approximately 1 inch at a time, working my way along the rod.  Once a spot is heated, I roll it into the base powder, melt that in and then roll into layers of assorted frit colors and sizes.  This is a rather tedious process, working inch by inch, but the resulting branch is beautiful and I think worth it.

• Colored Glass Rods

Colored glass is also available in rod form.  The type of glass I use is made in rods of approximately 6-8mm diameter and approximately 12″ lengths.  These are ordered by the 1/4 pound. 

I use colored glass rods primarily for vines and leaf stems.  Given the complexity of my vine pieces, it would be difficult and very annoying to use clear rods and coat them with  powders as I do the branches, so I just buy rods in my desired vine color.  These are bent, twisted, melded and shaped into the vine forms in the torch flame. 

Luckily for us glass artists, the companies that make our glass are continuously working out new color formulas, so the palette we have available is ever-expanding.  Although my knowledge of the making of colored glass is rudimentary, I do know that the colors are produced by metal oxides added into the glass material.  Each color has its own peculiarities and reacts to the mix of gases in the flame in its own way, which is one of the challenges of flameworking.  If we don’t treat each color appropriately while working it, the color is ruined – it turns an ugly burnt charcoal gray or a distasteful liverish color.  Some colors are especially tricky yet appealing in that they can produce a range of colors,  from amber to purple for example, depending on the gas mixture in the flame. 

Before colored glass was readily available, artists added the metal oxides right into their glass in the flame.  One artist who works this way is Suellen Fowler.  She has such mastery over the colors that, on a tiny perfume bottle, she can produce incredible blends of yellow to scarlet through her manipulation of the torch gases, and she is able to achieve a richness and depth of colors that we cannot duplicate with pre-colored, manufactured glass.  See Suellen’s beautiful work at www.flameworkglass.com and click on the Museum tab.

For some time I’ve been toying with the idea of not attaching fruits onto branches in a natural way, but of including them in the piece in an abstract manner.  The first piece I am working on in this vein of thought is a tree trunk with acorns.

The piece started out as an idea and a quick sketch.  Since making the sketch a couple months ago, I have been contemplating various ways I might go about building the structure of the trunk, and how to include acorns in the piece. 

I settled on the idea of “drawing” the trunk in lines with dark glass rods, and including a knothole into which I can place the acorns.  

First I built about half the trunk, as if it’s cut in half vertically.  I love this process of “drawing” with the glass rods.  It’s a fun process – a discovery every time.  Although I have an idea in mind, the piece unfolds in the making as much through my interacting with and listening to the glass as through imposing my will upon it.  Each color brings its own life as well, which is part of the discovery. 

Next I made the knothole.  I need it small enough that it won’t dominate the piece, yet large enough that the acorns can be retrieved out of it, and the gaps in the knothole must be small enough to prevent the acorns from falling through.

Now comes the very difficult part:  attaching the knothole to the trunk and building the rest of the trunk.

The difficulty lies in the large number and the close proximity of connections being made.  The knothole must be connected onto the trunk in a number of spots in order to be secure.  Given that this is not a life-size piece, all these connections are in very close proximity to each other.  This situation is very challenging – as I heat one connection spot and meld it together, I can easily flash too much heat onto a neighboring area of the piece, inadvertently cracking it.  Given the nature of the type of glass I work with, it is too difficult to keep the entire piece hot in order to avoid that issue.  So, I must work patiently and calmly, working from connection spot to connection spot, gradually building the trunk over several days and repairing each inadvertent crack along the way.

At this point, I have most of the trunk complete, the knothole connected in, and a few unwanted cracks to repair before I can complete the trunk, finish the ends and add the leaves.  In this image, I have sandblasted the piece-in-progress.  This removes the shiny surface, enabling me to find the cracked spots.

When it is complete, I will post another entry to show the final piece.

A point is the basic building block of many flameworked glass pieces.  A point is a section of glass tube with stretched “handles” or points on each end.  One of the handles is open on the tip and used as a blow tube.  (The “handles” and the completed unit are both called points.)

This sketch illustrates the process of making a point, and photos of me making a point follow. 

First, the artist heats and softens the center of a glass tube while rotating it in the flame.  The tube is pulled apart to stretch the softened area into a long, thin section, which is then cut in half with the flame.  This leaves 2 halves of the tube, each with one “handle” or point.

Working with one half of the tube now, the tip is broken off with a tool to produce a hole.  This becomes the blowpipe into which the artist will later blow while making the desired object. 

The artist now heats the tube one to three inches away from the beginning of the first point, softening another area.  When soft enough, the tube is again pulled apart to create another long, thin section on the other side.  Again, this long, thin section is cut apart using the flame. 

A point has been created.  This point can now be made into the bowl or the foot of a wine goblet, a vase, cup, head or torso, a bird, balloon, clown, or in my case, a fruit or a set of leaves.

Pulling points is a basic and relatively easy task; however, pulling points well is a difficult skill to acquire!  In order to make a symmetrical, balanced goblet bowl or foot for example, the points must be completely symmetrical and balanced.  On a good day, 5% of my points are symmetrical and balanced.  Luckily, fruits and leaves do not require perfect points, so I have not had to perfect my point making. 

Here are two artists who have mastered the art of flameworking and who, on a good day, make 100% of their points perfectly symmetrical and balanced, then go on to make extraordinary, elegant pieces out of them. 

Cesare Toffolo   http://www.toffolo.com/gallery/

Roger Parramore   http://rogerparramore.com/indexhp.html