I think these cathedrals might have been the first project I did as a collaboration with a glass artist.
He had gotten a new tool that let him grind down and polish glass at whatever angles he wanted, and so he made an egg in the process of becoming completely capable with this new tool, and because he does a lot of dragon-themed work, he posted it on his social media as a ‘dragon egg’. His followers ate it up. He had a ton of interest- how much, when can I get one, etc. However, he didn’t want to spend his time making eggs because it’s pretty tedious so he told them an amount that he figured would just settle the issue and the demand would go away, but that’s not what happened and so he had to deliver. But he felt like for that money they should get something a bit more than just a glass egg, so he wondered if I could make some sort of medieval display situation for it, and I came up with this little cathedral.
It has a battery-powered black light LED to light up the egg and the doors can be opened and closed. I really enjoyed this project because I had to figure out some new methods for production and run lots of tests. The math/geometry involved is a lot of fun because I’m designing in two dimensions for a three dimensional thing so there’s lots of leaning back in my chair trying to picture parts of it in my brain.
Corporate Lobby Sign
Once upon a time, an ammunition company developed a neat new technology where they put a little glow-in-the-dark blob on the back of a bullet that would glow when the bullet was fired, showing where it went. This was great, because previous tracer ammunition used a little tiny fire to show where it was going. But that little tiny fire can set big fires. And in the military it can give away your position. So this clever company grew big and fast. And it needed a nice sign in the lobby.
Initially they wanted each letter to be filled with dummy bullets, which would look really cool but it also added some additional issues to the project because that meant that every letter would need to be able to hold within it about thirty pounds of ammo. I found a source to make channel letters with a transparent cap, and because we didn’t really need to fill all three inches of depth with bullets, I created a foam cutting device using the nichrome wire from a thrift store hair dryer and carefully cut out the letter shapes from 1” thick foil-backed insulation foam to take up some of that space, but when we did a test mount on the wall they actually preferred the silver and we never filled them with the ammunition.
Now that I think about it, it’s too bad we don’t have fireflies here because it would be fun to fill the letters with them temporarily for like a christmas party or something but we’d have to release them afterwards.
My Caged Heart
Collaboration is a magical thing.
I’m trying to remember how it happened exactly, but basically somehow a very well known and incredible talented glass artist contacted me about doing some work to go along side his work. There’s all sorts of glass blowing competitions, exhibitions and trade shows that happen all throughout the country all year long, and James had just created an anatomical heart. It’s incredible. In fact, water will even circulate through it just like a real heart. His vision was to have it displayed in a cage of some sort, and even better if the cage had references to the new age Heart Chakra.
This project turned out great. We won awards with it. We both feel like the cage and the heart really balance each other well.
The Adjustable Luxograph
This has been a lot of fun to come up with. I was doing some edge-lit acrylic stuff, which led me to playing with multiple layers. I was doing the vehicle diagram plaques and one layer is full-color RGB that you can change with a remote and the top layer was just lit up in white with a brightness knob because if the background is lit up blue, the white has to be brighter. But with red, a lower-energy color, the white has to be dimmed or it will wash it out.
Anyway, playing with these layers I naturally got curious about three layers. Which led me to this Adjustable Luxograph. I took an RGB image, separated the channel information, etched it into the acrylic and then edge lit it with a dimmer knob for each layer. There’s a pretty powerful learning curve because basically, I’m taking a digital, additive-color model and producing it using a subtractive-color print method in light. There’s some really interesting adjustments that have to be made to the issue to counteract something analogous to the dot gain you get from certain types of paper.
"Make it look expensive" and "We need to fit more on the page"
Sometimes you’re given the task of please two directive that are at odds with each other, and working in the aftermarket auto industry for a company that has an enormous variety, it happened a lot. On one hand, the more items you cram into a page, the more cheaply made the stuff is going to read- mostly because that’s pretty much a key feature of promoting lots of stuff cheaply. We see it all the time in newspaper grocery specials, tabloids, junk mail and fast food menus.
So how do you make it look like the products aren’t cheap?
I did my best in this case by shooting high quality photos of the products, maintaining a very consistent visual language with color treatments, typography and balance. Was I successful?