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.  😊

Sandblasting little squares

A lesson in using the sandblaster today.

First of all I cut 12 small squares of glass, then piecing them back together I stuck some sticky backed vinyl all over them. 

I then drew a basic flower image that I had found on the internet.

Next, I cut the lines out of the flowers with a sharp craft knife. The parts I cut away were the parts that I wanted blasted by sand.

The sticky backed vinyl wasn’t quite sticky enough, so I started again with strips of masking tape which was a bit stronger.

Once I had given them a good blast in the sandblaster, I removed them from the tape, cleaned them off and started to wrap each square in copper foil.

I then fluxed the copper foil and soldered it all back together again.

Not the neatest work I have done, but I think it looks ok, and shows off the sandblasting nicely.

Sandblasting Freddie Mercury

Today at Uni we were playing with the sandblaster, and creating images from blasting away layers of glass.

I thought I might do a photo of Freddie Mercury – my all time musical hero.

First I found a nice simple photo that I wanted to use on Google images, laid a nice piece of flashed glass on top and draw around it.

Flashed glass is a clear glass with a thin layer of colour on the top, so when you blast the colour away you get back to the clear glass beneath.

I quickly realised that drawing on the glass was a silly idea as I had to mask it off – so I cleaned the glass up, covered it with masking tape and started again.

This time I cut out the shape with a sharp blade.

After quite a lot of sandblasting – it takes longer than I thought to get through a 1mm layer of glass – my masking tape started to come away, so I called it a day at that point.

But, quite happy with this… not sure if it immediately shouts Freddie Mercury, but I know who it is  😊