This is part 2 of a 3 part series.
When we last left, the pattern had just been finished. If you recall, the first piece I made I used some heavier weight paper that I had from the drawering class I took. That didn't go very well, so it was back to the drawing board for a material to make the pattern out of. In the aisle stained glass supplies are in at Hobby Lobby they have these sheets of clear plastic. I'm not sure what their actual purpose is, but I thought they'd be pretty good to make a pattern out of because while they were fairly sturdy they were also fairly pliable and seemed thin enough that they could be cut easily. I was really excited about it because this seemed like something that clearly would not wilt when hit with water AND it seemed like it would be reusable. I mentioned in the post for SG1 that I had no desire to repeat the same pieces, but it would be nice to have a reusable pattern so I would at least have the option (if nothing else I would have the option to remake parts that needed to be redone). That was uh, that was a mistake, is I believe the technical term. It started off well.
The markings from the carbon paper had transferred but weren't too hard to rub off, so I went ahead and started re-writing piece numbers/colors. It was at this point I said to myself, I said "Mike, why don't you try cutting it, just a little bit, just to see how it goes." Didn't go well. Maybe it's just because I have shitty scissors but the edges around the cuts cracked as I went. I tried going over it with a razor, but it was too thick and that proved too difficult. The last idea I had was to get out the ole Dremel and fit it with the cut-off wheel, but that just melted the plastic. Well shit. Back to Hobby Lobby. I ended up picking matboard because it was thick, but I was quite confident that worst case scenario I could cut it with a razor. Matboard was ok, not great, definitely won't be used again. First of all the thickness was good at resisting water damage, but it was actually thicker than the cutting wheel on my glass cutter, so all the pieces had an extra eighth of an inch around them which made grinding take a lot longer. The other bad part about it being thick was it really held it's shape. That seems good, except it meant it didn't want to glue flat, it would either bend up on the edges or in the middle. Good thing I own a lot of clamps.
Why yes, that IS a copy of Saul Williams The Seventh Octave. The only other comment to make on the pattern to pieces process is that I put a lot more thought in how the grain of the glass went. Anytime I was cutting a set of pieces that were going to be placed consecutively, I tried to line them up on the glass so it would sort of flow together.
You can see how the arm segments are set up there. I think my thought process with the fingers was this way they'd all have the same direction line. Also, the knuckles are fucking stupid, I have no idea why I thought that was a good idea.
I was really thrown off during the grinding process. SG1 really was made over the course of a couple days and it's true that it had a third of the pieces that SG2 does, but wouldn't that logically extrapolate to at most a week of work? I suppose it might if it were a week of me putting in eight hour days grinding glass, but I didn't think they'd give me a week off work. I was often putting in three hours of work a night and it still ended up taking me over a month to finish the grinding. That seemed so insane to me when I was thinking about it after the fact, here were my final thoughts as to why:
1. Detail was more important. On SG1 the only pieces that took any time were the mosaic on the underwear. Giant pieces like the legs/lower back/sky (I guess that's supposed to be the sky? I mean, it's blue) do not take very long to do and they cover a large part of the overall piece. I suspect the mosaic would have taken quite some time if it had mattered. I'm not saying I didn't care about how it looked, but really so long as the outer edges lined up it was fine. It was pretty irrelevant how the inner pieces fit together, which made sub-par grinding acceptable. With SG2 only the outer colored parts didn't matter. If the lines on the body didn't fit together right, it could end up looking pretty stupid pretty easily.
2. I was less tolerant of the pattern becoming unglued. For SG1 when the pattern started to come off I just went with it and did my best to get the piece to the right shape. This time, when the pattern started to come off, I stopped and re-glued. I was pretty unhappy with how the rubber cement had been working at this point, so I went to the number 1 gluing resource, thistothat.com. They suggested something called 3M 77. 3M 77 is a delight. It ended up adding a ton of time though because I probably re-glued a third to half of all the pieces.
3. Due to a poor job of keeping the sponge wet for SG1, I think my grinding wheel got quite a bit duller than it should have. It was still functional, but it took longer.
4. I kind of like doing it. While not that difficult, it does require a bit of dexterity and all of my concentration. It's the same reason I like knitting. It forces, as Swansong would say, me to listen past the noise inside my head. It was easy to just sit there and lose a couple of hours doing this, kind of a nice break from being a spaz.
THAT'S A BIG BASKET OF STAINED GLASS CHUNKS!
Give em a wash, put some copper foil on and good to go! Or I would have been, had I not dropped one of the pieces.
God that sucked. This is why I want a pattern I can re-use, so I could just cut a new piece instead of having to try and trace a pile of shattered glass. /sigh.
This was where the next big difference between SG2 and SG1 showed up.
DO YOU SEE HOW POORLY THOSE FIT!?! God that was infuriating. SG1 I would have just rolled with it. I could still lay the solder fine so it would, I guess, be ok, but little imperfections like that add up and if I had taken the time to try and get all the detail in during grinding, I may as well fix this right? I think in total I had to touch up twenty pieces, so that problems like that, ended up looking like this:
The other challenge was that when I made the pattern, I did my best to draw a square around the piece, but in reality it was probably skewed. This meant that when I tried to force it into the jig I made, it didn't want to fit perfectly. Few more touch-ups and it was solder time. That was a lot of fucking soldering. Despite sweating to death in my respirator, it was still enjoyable, because the thing was finally really coming together. It's hard to see this:
And not smile. Of course even the washing of this thing was more difficult. It's far too big to fit in my sink and the shower was pretty ineffective. Bucket and rag go! Final step was patina and finishing compound. You may recall there are two colors of patina available, so three line colors total. My thought was copper would be a no brainer for the inside of the body. Silver made sense for the colored outer. That left black for shadow. I was pretty happy with how that turned out. Did you forget how it looks? Here's that same picture!
I would have taken a picture of it with sun coming through, but I forget to do that before starting part 3. What happens in part 3? Shit gets real son.
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