Thursday 23 June 2011

Work in Progress

I thought you might like to see what I have been upto, or at least one of the things that I have been working on. It will be a new framed piece and has a lampwork daisy and a dinky little torch blown vase to hold it in (and yes, I was very very pleased when the vase worked first time i tried it !)



I have been meaning to make this one up for a while as its a couple of months since I had the idea but as I had a request from Layne Rowe for more daisies for his blown glass pieces I decided to get it done while i was in daisy mode !



Here you can see it in the frame, Im still tinkering about with exactly how its going to all sit together and how many petals will be with it etc ...and given that i can occasionally be ever so slightly particular about these things (*cough*) this might take a while !!

Saturday 18 June 2011

There's something in the water in Surrey...

Frit is something that I dont use very much, I never really have despite the fact I love some of the effects that I see people getting when they use it in their work. It is not that I dont have any frit, believe me I have no shortage of it (so pretty !) I just dont often use it. So I decided it was time I made a concerted effort to make friends with some of my frit.

I tried a few different techniques and found the results quite interesting, Although as you can see from the swirls on the ones below I couldn't help but add a little extra surface decoration, when I look at these beads they dont scream at me that they are "mine" in the way that my beads normally do (to me at least). 

Then I was talking to Sarah, a fellow lampworker and friend who lives just a little way across Surrey  and she was saying that she has also been playing with Frit this week, which is unusual for her too ! She's made some beautiful beads, like these below (more pics on her Flickr) and I love the fact that they are very "Sarah" beads, she has taken the frits and made them into beads in her own style.



It got me thinking of what makes up a persons "style"? I generally think that any style that can be ascribed to me is down to the fact I have quite a specific idea of what I do and dont like in the way of colour, form and pattern and that those preferences come across despite using a variety of techniques. 

How would you describe artistic "style" ? Do you think you have a style of work and if so what would you say it is?