I tried 'Lampwork' (Glass Sculpting) - it's SO HARD!

In this video, we're going to dive into glass flame sculpting, which I've seen in my Tik Tok feed for a long time and looks really satisfying. Quick interruption to say thank you to everyone who backed my Epic Anatomy Kickstarter over last weekend. I did not expect that we would be beating our funding goal on the first day. I'm so grateful and it means so much to me and my studio and our ability to function. So, massive thank you. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, please go check out the Epic Anatomy Kickstarter. It's an amazing anatomy book. my team and I have made that you are going to absolutely love. All right, back to the video. Now, I've wanted to do glass sculpting for years, and after a little bit of online stalking, I finally found someone I think can take me through the process. — Hi, how you going? Sil Silica Studio, right? I'm a big fan. Could you uh put that on? Uh I'm just going to uh come in and I'm going to get you to show me how to use glass. Absolutely. Well, you've come to the right place. — It's not you that'd be welcoming. — Thank you for having me here. — It's my pleasure. — Liz runs Silica Studio and is hosting me here today. How did you get into this cuz you're selftaught? — Yes. I studied ceramics. I went to art school. I started melting marbles down in my pieces and I just got so enamored with like the fluidity and the transparency of the material. a friend of a friend just happened to have all of this equipment just sitting around. It wasn't being used and I set it all up and sat at the torch, watched YouTube videos and tried to figure out how to do it. And eventually I had some idea. — There's just something really stunning about glass sculpture. — It's like reflective and prismatic and almost crystalline. If you don't mind, could we watch you work first and you can tell us a little bit about how it works as if we're complete beginners and completely stupid? — Yes. Um, — a beginner's class. Is that right? — Is that what you want? — For all for just for our viewers at home. — Yes. — So, the first thing I needed to learn was about poop. Specifically, PO and OP, which is how you light the torch. You turn on the propane, that's the P, light the fire, and then turn on the oxygen, which intensifies the flame. And then to turn it off, you have to go oxygen off, then propane off. Fortunately, abbreviated, it's really easy to remember cuz I have poop on my mind all the time. Even so, I'd still manage to stuff this up a few times. So, the first thing we did was Bliss showed me how to make a bead, which happens on this mandrel, a stainless steel rod, which they're dipped in a compound called bead release, so that the glass will be able to come off later. Then after heating up a glass rod, they used a process called winding. You spin the mandrel so the glass wraps around it and becomes like a hot little sphere. And once the bead stops glowing orange, you either placed it into a kiln or in this case shove it into a bowl of insulating material called vermiculite, which in theory will help it cool down without cracking. It sort of insulates and keeps in the heat because the risk is if the temperature of the glass changes too rapidly from hot to cold to hot, it cracks. You probably should have had your glasses on during that part. — I was looking at your flame. Yeah. — Yeah. Do you have little spots when you blink? — No, I just can't see. — Yeah. Okay, cool. — Well, I like the — They look good. — Do they? — Yeah. Like with the propane. — Very just a little Just a tiny little bit until you can hear the gas. — Yep. — Nice. — Yeah. So, I should I shouldn't play with it, should I? Now that I could actually look at the flame without my eyes melting, Bliss showed me how to make a stringer, which is where you heat up an end of the glass rod, grab a pair of tweezers, and stretch it out, and you can sort of feel it pulling the glass out into a thinner line. It's really satisfying. I am not super controlled in doing it, but you can apparently control the thickness at which it comes out. And you use these thinner pieces to do detailed work. I was, of course, immediately an expert at this, and Bliss was really impressed with my work. I made several of these and had a go at making my own green bead. But then it was time to move on to some more advanced techniques. — Yay! I got my first explosion. — Yay. — With a few stringers in hand, I moved on to making a few beads and trying out some more advanced techniques by adding little drops and details to my beads with the stringers, which is where it starts to become a little bit more of a craft. controlling patterns and twisting and shaping the glass, reheating it, using the graphite paddles to sort of push the shapes around a little bit. Slowly but surely, getting the feel with how sculpting tools and various mixing and heating techniques can allow me some control over the look of my beads. Really, this early on, I'm just trying to get a feel for how the medium works. And moving on to my third bead, I thought I'd try and go for a contrast between burgundy and orange and the green, which I rolled over in what's called frit, which it turns out is really finely crushed up glass. And after my three experimental beads had

time to slowly cool down, it was time to see how they turned out. In no particular order, there you go. I got a bead that I won't pull off, but that dissolves in the stuff or whatever. What was second? It was this one cuz I did the twisty pinchies. Now that's got a crack in It can either be time that it takes to cool down or it could be compatibility. Sometimes glass doesn't want to make friends with other glass. — Well, I did use the particularly explosive glass. — I reckon that's what it was. You was? — Absolutely. That's what it is. Yeah, — it bested me in the end. And this looks nothing like I thought it would. It looks pretty awful to be honest. — There's not enough contrast. — Right. Well, I'm doing great so far. So stuff you've made. — Yes. — I love the little strawberries. They're so cute. Little like berries. They go well in this medium. — They do. They look great in the light. — They really do. Yeah. Like juicy almost. Now these sculptures in sculptures. — You got mushrooms in clear, flower in clear. That's very pretty. I like the way that the lens sort of amplifies the 3Dness. Shall we give one of those a go? — I think yes. I think we could give that a go. — I feel like we could collaborate on a piece. — I Yeah, I reckon we should do that. — Like build a scene cuz we've got a lot of like flora stuff happening like a lot of flowers and stuff. We're going to do a sculpture and a thing. — Yeah. — And then we're going to do a scene. — Sure. Is like the greatest. Let's see how this goes. — Yeah. — Sure. — Let's Okay. — Now, the beads. Well, let's face it. Beads are babies work. That's lamp work with training wheels. We were starting to move on to more advanced stuff, an implosion, which starts to reveal to me how complicated and tricky lamp work can be. Essentially, you take transparent glass rod and heat it up to form a large bowl before squishing it flat. And then you add details with your stringers in a somewhat spread out way so that as you slowly add layers and melt the transparent glass, which will then wrap around itself underneath, those details that you draw will sort of shrink into themselves and create this really cool lens effect. The glass begins to fold over on itself and those blobs of color that you put down earlier begin to shrink and form what looks like flowers encased in a droplet of glass. Or at least that's what it's supposed to look like. I managed to create a very convincing portrait of a fried egg, which is absolutely what I was going for, and we don't need to make any more comments about that. I learned an important lesson around this point, and that is to be careful using metal tools when handling the glass while it's hot. We accidentally managed to impale our transparent layer with tweezers. And oh well, onwards and upwards. I'm feeling confident. It's time to turn up the heat. So, what have we learned? Uh, apparently nothing. — You're very ambitious. — What I really want to do — is free form sculpting. — You think I'm ready? — Let's do it. Bliss gave me a bit of clay cuz of course being a multi-talented artist, Bliss just has mediums lying around the place. I sculpted a little reference skull about the size that I thought we might want to aim at, which we could potentially combine with a bunch of other pieces that we sculpt like flowers and garden bug like things to make a cool little scene. Liz is really good at sculpting flowers and pretty things, and I tend to like skulls and anatomy, especially when it's epic, because frankly, anatomy is epic, which this is the perfect transition to a plug. Did someone say promotional plug? I'm currently running a Kickstarter for Epic Anatomy. It has a couple of weeks left and it is an amazing book. It takes anatomy, which is notoriously difficult and challenging and hard, and makes it what it should be, fun and memorable and epic. And you will be as empowered as Dr. E. vile in being able to bring all of the monstrosities and creations of your mind to life with all the skills you gain alongside him and his sidekick Cubot as they discover how to synthesize the ultimate super soldiers. Go check it out. The links in the description. Kickstarter is only running for a couple more weeks, so don't miss out. Back to the video. Now, it was getting later in the day and we were actually getting low on the gases we had to use. But with the time and gas we had left, we started to take a stab at a little bit of glass sculpting. Bliss was working on laying a bit of a foundation for me to work with later to sculpt a skull with. And meanwhile, I was exercising my sculpting skills by creating a bone, which was less uh pretty than Bliss's bone, but it was my first bone. So, if we have a bone to pick, let it not be this one. Let it instead be my next sculpture, which was a teeny tiny snail, which I decided could rest on the skull's head later, and which was my first real victory of the day, a handmade sculpture that would be a part of our eventual piece. I was so happy with this little guy. But alas, that would be the end of what we could achieve with our first day together with a plan to reconvene a week

later. But our vision would not work unless we had a foundation to lay it on. — Hello. Hi. It is Bliss here from Beyond the Outside Realms. And Jazza has given me a very important task to create a base for our project. So I was thinking, hm, how am I going to do this? And then I had an idea. So I got these glass tubes and I figured if I heat it up, cut a section out of it, and then flatten it, that will give us a bit of a puddle, right? That didn't work. They're just not puddly enough. Next, I tried to melt down as much boro silicut as I possibly could. And then I smashed it down. Still not round enough. So, I got the rod and I extended out the sides so that it can be a little bit more round and puddly. Success. I think that this one is it. Hopefully, it will look great with our project. I'm pretty confident that it will. is one week later and we are back and I am keen to see how Bliss has done. This is the result of your experiments. They are magical. That works really well. — It looks like a squashed frog. — It I thought the same thing. Reminiscent of the fragility of life and the squishiness of frogs. — Perfect. So, with a foundation that we could work on, Bliss and I divided to conquer. While they were sculpting flowers and all the pretty things to fill our scene with, I set to work creating my skull sculpture. And fortunately, this really did feel like riding a bike in the sense that we just got stuck into it a week later. And I really felt like I was picking up where I left off. And if anything, I actually felt like I had a much better familiarity with the medium and was building up more and more confidence as I worked on the skull. early on was harder, but as I evolved and developed a respect and understanding of the medium and the way it worked, slowly but surely, I was able to shape a fairly respectable skull from the foundation that Bliss gave me. Meanwhile, every time I looked across at what they were working on, I was always impressed and delighted by all of the beautiful flora and grass and plants and things we'd be able to surround our scene with. Oh, hey, look at this. This is Bliss's website and their Instagram page. You should go check out those things because Bliss has been so accommodating and is also really talented and provides stuff you would want, either content that's really fun to look at, but also items for sale and classes you can book. If you want to have some of that experience of lamp work yourself without that high cost of buying the equipment, go give it a try and support a local artist if you're Melbourne base. Thank you, Bliss. You're the best. And so is the bliss of working with glass. Let's get back to that. I feel like I'm done with the skull. You're doing incredible work with the flowers. I'm in my skeleton zone. — So, what I'm thinking skeleton hand reaching out of the ground and holding a flower. — Oh, I like it. — And maybe that's the flower with the butterfly on it. — Oh, that's like death and new life. — And it's shall we? YES, — WE CAN DO THIS. — Oh my god, — this was such a fun medium to work with because it really encouraged me to get ambitious and everything felt challenging but at the same time achievable. The more I became familiar with the medium, the more I could understand what my limitations were and what I could attempt. Yeah, there was some tricky moments. I had to undo some things or redo some things, but at the same time, I was doing much better than I did earlier on. And having worked with many mediums, glass work or lamp work really feels like a very honest medium. What I mean by that is it can feel unpredictable and difficult, but it is actually really reliable in how it reacts to how you treat it. So as you build up familiarity with the kind of heat it takes to moltenify the areas that you're working on and the way different tools interact with the medium, you can develop this sort of relationship with the glass where if you respect it and give it the time and the tools it takes, you can get cool results. And this bony hand I was trying to create holding the stem of what would be a flower that it's holding stretching out from the ground would have been impossible for me to achieve on our first day. But after spending time with the medium and really enjoying getting immersed in the work, I was really loving how it was progressing and really proud of the results we were achieving. — So we kind of have a project ready to come together. We have the foundation — and we have the core pieces. So, we just got to weld them together cuz they're all very glassy and separate. — Yes. — How do we do that? — So, I feel like we should start with the biggest pieces first. So, we've got — skull and base. — Yeah. And then — hand. — Yeah. — Then — smush all the plants in.

— Smoosh Add all the flowers. — Butterfly snail. — Butterfly snail and your grass. So, we call this hot attachment. It's usually a pretty complex activity, especially when you've got multiple components, different sizes, different temperatures. So, we're going to want to make sure that we keep this piece hot as we're going. Great. — Um, if it loses too much heat, we're going to put it back in the aniler and then let it heat up again. — Sounds good. Basin skull. — Let's go. — This has been one of my favorite new mediums to learn. Look, the barrier to entry is pretty high. The equipment you need, the gas, all that stuff. It's not a hobby you dabble in. It's kind of one you commit to, but I can 100% see why Bliss fell in love with glass and has just immersed themselves in it. I could totally see myself adopting this as a hobby and would encourage any of you to try it out. But in a world of synthetic art and shortcuts, it's mediums like this that I'm feeling more and more connected to these days. I'm just in love with art that feels tangible and physical and honest and sometimes burns you a bit, but that makes you feel alive. Damn it. Honestly, it is a medium with potentially stunning and beautiful results and worthy of the challenge it takes to grapple with it to achieve those results and also one that compels you to challenge yourself like Bliss and I were doing in trying to create this scene which as you'll see will be fraught with challenges all along the way. It was going so well but we have our first crisis. There was this growing crack in the center of the base of the whole thing which has cracked in half. So, we're going to try and weld it back together with plants and things. We'll see how that goes. — We can try. — Shall we get this guy out? — Yeah. — So, these are the bits that need surgery. What if you like heat it up? Well, if we start by welding with the little guy, I don't think this will be like permanent fix, but — yeah, still a bunch of those. — Hearing the cracks? — Yeah, I love these sounds. — Oh, — sorry. Just hold it there. Hold it up. Do you want to put a big grass where we've got this? — Yeah, that's a great idea. Push that in there. — I think that's good. Yeah, that feels pretty good to me. — What was that? — Torch being smothered. Okay, — pop it back in. That's good. And then we'll let that get to heat. — Oh yeah, — good job. A victory. Okay, we're back on track. We're calling it done. We decided not to put the butterfly on top because it felt done. It felt perfect and we didn't want to add too much or risk unbalancing it or cracking it. We're really happy with the outcome and just hope it survives the cool down. But thank you so much Silica Studios and well Bliss for having us here today. If you want to check out their amazing work and of course book classes. So if you're Melbourne based, you want to learn to do this. It's really fun and Bliss is super patient and very encouraging. — Thank you J for coming and learning this wonderful thing. You did such a good job. We — Ready for it? This was so fun. really hard and the outcome is very delicate. I've even broken it a couple of times in transporting it here for our reveal shots. Fortunately, epoxy and super glue fixed it up fine. Thank you Bliss for making this happen. Thank you for watching this video and make sure to subscribe for more fun with art and creativity cuz you never know what's next. See you later.