Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello my name’s Todd Hansen we’re here at the Art of Fire Contemporary Glass Blowing
Studio in Laytonsville, Maryland. We're at www.artoffire.com. I’ve been a glass blower
for about twelve years now, I’ve got several different lines of glasswork that I work on
and I’ll be talking to you about glass blowing. Clear glass is really pretty but colored glass
is nice to look at too. There are several ways to get color into blowing glasswork.
The way that actual colored glass is made is to add minerals or elements to clear glass
so when you hear the term cobalt blue, the manufacturer’s thrown cobalt into a vat
of clear glass and has turned that glass blue. Copper ruby is just that, it’s copper that’s
been thrown in and that makes the glass a really deep red. Cranberry glass, the pink
glass is actually made from gold so depending on what you throw in, the concentrations that
you add and maybe whatever element you might add as well you can get a pink or a transparent
versions of different colored glass and one of the ways we color our glass when pouring
into it is taking colored rods that someone else has made. We’ll take a chunk of glass
and we’ll preheat it and then stick it on the tip of a blowing iron, that becomes the
very first bubble that you’re working with that’s actually a bubble of color, we’ll
take that and we’ll heat that piece of color up, we’ll blow into it just a little bit
and trap the air with our finger and I’ve got a small bubble my piece of color now then
what I’ll do is layer clear glass on top of that. With those layers of clear glass
you can also pick up frit, which are the smaller crushed versions of colored glass to decorate
the glass and also take threads and trails of glass and wrap that around the body piece
too so you’ve got a little color on the inside, color on the outside and then depending
on how you manipulate that you can decorate the piece even further.