Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Masking

I have sidelined other work to focus on a sandblasting project.
I started by building a big hopper for sand and a rack to support the work, then draping some polythene sheets around and fitting up an extractor fan. I hooked a helmet up with an airline to keep the dust out and otherwise wore a certain amount of protection.
The difficulty with these processes is the masking, it has to hold in place and has to be fairly painless to get off. But however painless it is a major hinderance to understanding how things will look when it is gone. Anyway, this is the piece so far with masking still on. I needed to see it out of its crèche to think about the final area around the roots of the tree.
It is usual to view blasted glass from the non blasted side, so the characters here have been traced through onto the back so that I can blast them from the other side.