Today was our big day. Judith Schaechter flew up from Canberra last night and after an early run on the sand at Broadbeach this morning, was soon ready for action. All our 14 participants arrived in good time and by 10 am Judith was ready to go.
The first part of the morning was spent watching Judith's slide show of her work. Her body of work is huge and the detail in her technique is just amazing - much of how she produces her images has been learned by trial and error, simply trying any way she can think of to produce an image on the glass and in this way she has built up the repetoire of techniques that give her work such a unique look.
The rest of the day was spent watching Judith at work and trying her methods for ourselves. She had brought with her many samples of glass that she has worked images into, and spent a good deal of time going through the pieces and explaining just how she achieved the effects demonstrated in the glass. She also brought with her a piece of glass on which she had just started an image - one of her signature faces had just been started by sandblasting the surface of the glass to reveal a light shadow of the form. During the class Judith showed us how to work the surface of the flashed glass with an engraver and a diamond hand pad to produce exquisite detail. We all tried out the engraving and sanding techniques ourselves on this piece and all achieved excellent results.
The day went so quickly, we had a break for lunch and in the afternoon watched Judith demonstrate her painting techniques, but before we knew it the day was over.
Marina from Sydney and Gavin from Hobart
Judith explaining the stages for shading a face and getting detail to a fascinated Mia.
The demo piece with a face already sandblasted into it. Judith then showed us how to draw in the detail with a dremmel (engraver) and we all got to have a go.
Some of Judith's sample pieces.
This face is made up of four layers of sanded, engraved and painted glass, in real life the richness of the colour is just amazing.
The four layers that made up the image photographed above.
The demonstration face that we all had worked on. The glass Judith uses is called "flash glass" this is a sheet of clear glass that has had a very thin layer of coloured glass applied to one side of it. the detail is achieved by working back through the layer of coloured glass.
Everybody felt like they had learned something new from the day, which is of course, the best measure of success for a workshop like this and it was worth all the effort of bringing it together.
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