Monday 4 April 2022

The Kaleidoscope Project - Mandala Disc

 As part of a uni assignment, I am creating a type of kaleidoscope – the viewer will be made from mirrors and the discs will all be different using various forms of architectural glass techniques.

This disc is a sandblasted mandala design.

I started off my drawing a mandala in a iPad app called Amaziograph.


I found a lovely piece of flashed glass, which is clear glass with a coating of colour on one side.

You can sandblast through the coating to make sections clear glass again.


I used a masking tape and placed the mandala image on the top, and cut through them both with a very sharp craft knife.


Then it was off to the sandblaster to blast away the parts I had cut out.


I wasn’t really prepared for how long it would take to blast through a 1mm layer of coloured glass – this was about 2 hours work!


After a few more hours I was finally getting somewhere…


I removed all of the tape, and popped the piece into a kiln to fire at 650 degrees so that it would soften the sand blasted areas to make it all nice and shiny again.


I’ve still got to grind the edges and maybe put some tape around it to make it a little neater, but so far I am quite pleased with that.



And it looks really cool through my kaleidoscope viewer.  😊




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