I started listing some of my pieces on Saatchi Art! I have a few originals up for sale there, as well as prints on paper and canvas. These are the pieces I have up so far, more will follow soon. Click here to go to my profile!

I cut out the pattern on my next Artifacts piece. I'm tentatively calling it Remnant No. 2. This is it after I cut out the pattern traced on the contact paper, applied some acrylic gel medium, and removed the rest of the stencil pieces. This layer will dry clear, but shiny and textured. The next step is to apply silver metal leaf to the pattern. That might be the last step, or I might add some more textures to and do some sanding, like I did with Artifact No. 2. I might change the orientation, too. There's a lot up in the air with this one right now.

I did some more work over the weekend on my Montana de Oro piece.

I'm not 100% happy with how it came out. I really didn't want the outside to look so brushy. As you can see I wasn't very careful with the direction of my brushstrokes. I tried using glazing medium, hoping it would level the paint out. But I either didn't use enough or it didn't agree with the slow dry blending medium I used. I think I'm going to block out the anemone with contact paper and do another pour around the outside. I don't think I want it to be one color. It has to wait for a little while though. I'm gearing up to head back to Ohio for a family visit soon. This is a good place to leave it for now.

I started talking about my glasswork here, but I don't think I mentioned that I started an Etsy shop. It's called Bobkat Ranch Crafts. Yes, it's really spelled Bobkat. My parents' names are Bob and Kathy, thus, Bobkat. My dad, my sister, and myself have been producing the working that's up for sale. You can get to it here.

Last weekend was another weekend spent with my parents and my sister up in Springville. That means no painting, but I did do some more glasswork. First, I turned more squares into circles. It's so much fun! Here they are before and after firing.

I fused some of these circles into a larger piece. I'll have more on that later, after I get some pictures taken. I also cut out a few more pieces while I was there. They still need to be fired.

The one on the left uses the rolled edges of the glass sheets. I've always want to to do something with the edges. I'll add some frit (small pieces of broken glass) to the empty areas between the rolled edges before I fire it. Then I'll slump it over our candle bridge mold. The one in the middle is going to be a cone bowl. Hopefully. If you look at my past posts you'll see I haven't had good luck with that mold. I'll have to fire it sometime when I can sit in the workshop to babysit it. And the one on the right will be a shallow bowl or platter.

I have this piece in the works, too. Right now the pattern is just traced on contact paper. I need to cut it out and paint it on, somehow. I'm thinking of using metal leaf on this one. I have done anything with metal leaf for a while.

We got a few new molds for slumping glass. One of them is for a larger, steep sided bowl. It's a little more challenging to use than our other molds. Here's my first attempt at using it.

The mold instructions say to peek at it during the firing schedule's high temperature hold time. One of the challenges with this mold is that the sides are so steep, the glass starts to slide down them towards the bottom very quickly. You can see in the picture above that the bowl has started to shrink to the bottom. The edges of the glass have pulled away from the mold by about an inch. So I think I left it at that high temperature hold for too long. At this point there was still 15 minutes of that hold time left, but I cancelled the firing and started the cool down process.

Here's the finished bowl. It has a few issues. The pictures don't show it, but the sides of the bowl are thicker than normal. You can see, however, that the outside edge of the bowl came out irregular instead of circular. Also, the bottom of the bowl has a texture to it. All of those issues were caused by the glass sliding down the edge of the mold.

Even with all those issues, I like it! I love the glass that I used. It looks like someone spilled ink into water then froze it into glass. I also like the texture on the bottom of the bowl. But all those issues mean you won't see it in our Etsy shop. Looks like I have a new fruit bowl!