Beard Beads

Me and the husband, Don, were watching “Law and Order” the other night. One of the characters on the show was this older gentleman who looked very well-kept in spite of or perhaps because of the fact that he had two very visible beads woven into his beard. Don decided he liked that look and with Fat Tuesday approaching (we were going to a party that night) he thought this would be a good time for me to make beads for his beard. Technical issues of note for this project include figuring out how to make whatever bead design Don wishes and also figuring out how to make the beads stay in the beard temporarily without the use of adhesives.

Of course Don’s beard has a back story. It may not be completely relevant to this blog but it is funny so I’ll tell you all about it. Don’s not a slave to his facial hair; when he grows a beard he just lets it grow and grow. No trimming, ever, except right around the ol’ pie hole so the beard won’t interfere with nourishment entering the body. Once a year on the first day of Spring he shaves the whole thing off and then on the second day of Spring it begins to grow anew. Just like flowers and baby birds.

Onto the project. Don decided that, since Fat Tuesday is also Super Tuesday, he should wear one bead that was black with blue edges and one bead that was white with pink edges (to represent the two Democratic candidates). The black bead should have the word “Judgment” written on it in white and the white bead should have the word “Experience” written on it in black (also to represent the two candidates. It’s funny what people who don’t do glass will ask you to make.

I wound the beads on 1/8″ mandrels (to allow a little more room for the beard while still keeping the bead small) and then I annealed them. When they were cool I mixed up a thin solution of black and white enamels and clove oil. Using a crow quill pen (a very fine ink pen–the kind people used back in the day before cartridge or ball point pens were invented) I wrote the words directly on the beads. Then I heated them up to annealing temperature in my annealer and held them briefly in the flame to cure the paint. (You can see the paint get a little shiny when it melts.) Then back into the annealer.

It surprised me that the white enamel worked but the black got all funny looking. Possibly this is because the black is a Reusch enamel (lower firing temp.) while the white is a higher firing Fusemaster enamel. There wasn’t really any time to do additional tests. I was pleased that it worked as well as it did—the direct painting process was pretty simple and the words are legible and permanent.

Next, we tried to install a test bead in Don’s beard. We wanted something removable and something that wasn’t a hair wrap because…wrapping beard hair? Come on. We ended up wrapping scotch tape around the end of the beard hair segment and then threading that through the bead. After threading the bead we removed the tape, which was fun. To make the bead stay in place we jammed a couple of toothpicks (with tapered ends) cut shorter than the length of the bead and stuck those up through the bottom of bead. Primitive, but it worked really well. No visible rubber bands mucking things up. The beads just kind of lurk there in his beard. It’s easy to remove them too.

I suspect that this technique would work with normal hair too–for folks who want beads in their hair but don’t have dreadlocks? Anyone out there like that? Maybe, maybe not. Now you know how to do it anyway.

about those painted beads…painting on glass with enamels

Hi everyone. I’m back from the dead. Remember a month or two ago when I was talking about Bronwen Heilman style painted beads? I was really into them because they allowed me to incorporate other people’s artwork into my stuff. I found that particular medium extremely interesting. Other artists found it interesting as well but the general public, not so much.

Since I’m not independently wealthy, how I spend my time is directly related to what people are or are not buying from me so at the end of December I had to shelve the painted bead thing and get back to my regular bead line up. Much like the boro squids I worked on last summer, I learned a lot from trying this new medium–information that will probably be lost if I don’t say something about it. This info could be useful to you if you ever want to paint beads some day so here it is:

I’ll use my pal Partick’s painting to refresh your memory about this process: What’s going on here is he is painting with a mixture of enamels and oil a tiny painting in reverse on a piece of glass. First you draw a black outline and fire it so it is permanent. Then you paint the colors inside the outline and fire that. Then you paint white over all the colored areas and you fire that.

Then I take that painting and wrap it around a cylindrical bead like so:

One very time consuming part about the painting end of this process is the amount of time you spend scraping off dry paint that goes outside your outlines. Keep that in mind when choosing a design. It’s much harder to paint within long, skinny lines so you know that employing a design with a lot of skinny lines is going to mean a lot of clean up time.

Patrick is a detail freak so he didn’t mind all the work that went into this painting. In fact, I think he liked it. Other folks might find working with a design with fewer, or perhaps just differently placed outlines less insanity-provoking. Like, say, a martini:

Of course, the crane bead kicks the martini bead’s ass so you get out of this process what you put into it. I wouldn’t start out with a skinny line design, but that’s just me.

One element of this process with which I was pleasantly surprised is how easy it is to encase beads with sheet glass. Initially, I was freaking out at having to put those little paintings in the flame after working on them for so long. But it’s not that hard! I had very few bubbles and no breakage after I followed the instructions in Heilman’s book.

Start out with a very uniform, smooth cylinder-shaped bead. Do not preheat the sheet glass with your painting on it. Keep it at room temperature, pick it up with a tweezers and heat one end all the way up and down, adhere that end to your cylinder, keep the flame moving back and forth lengthwise on the glass as you slowly rotate it backwards.

With some practice the glass should just melt right on there. Issues with having the design line up at the seam can be resolved mostly by strategic design planning-locating it centrally within the sheet. Any background lines should be placed at the same height on either side so they meet when it goes around. I almost always have a coat of transparent colored glass over the outside of my cylinder. It seems to help the sheet to blend into the background.

But how, how you may be asking, do you figure out how long your sheet glass needs to be to go around a bead? I measured the circumference of a dime by rolling one along my little bead measuring calliper. A dime’s circumference is huge– 2.25 inches or so. That’s plenty of room for a drawing. I made all of my beads about the same circumference as a dime and cut my sheet to 2.25 inches long to start out.

The finished sizes of those beads were huge but after a while I was able to eyeball smaller sizes by winding beads and cutting sheet in relation to a dime–a little smaller or a lot smaller, depending. Fitting paintings onto a bead also turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. Not all of mine were perfect but that dime thing was really helpful for measuring.

Those are my bead painting tips. I hope you enjoyed them.

I Like Warning Labels

I like warning labels. If they’re good I’ll take pictures of them whenever I run into them. This one was on a piece of equipment at a local brewery. I don’t know what kind of a machine this was on but I know now to stay away from it.

 

I think there is artistic merit in warning labels. Like a well conceived logo they convey a clear and memorable message without using words or colors. Of the ones I’ve seen the designs are balanced and could hold their own if enlarged and put up on a wall. I’ve always wanted to do that, actually. And, also, actually I think warning labels would make excellent subject matter for painted beads.

I can foresee many technical and artistic difficulties involved with making warning label beads. Keeping straight lines straight while the glass is melting is a problem. Also, designing a warning label is not an easy thing. Everything has to be very simple and very clear. Machines have to be stripped down to the part or parts that will injure you and the resulting injury has to be as obvious as it is severe.

The closest that I ever came to designing a warning label in the past was when I made a “No Solicitors” sign for the store:

As I recall, what we did to get that image was borrow from an existing label the image of a guy being electrocuted then we added the hat, briefcase and fellow who is strangling him. It took Don and me much longer than you would think to make this. We weren’t real famaliar with computers then. In the end I think there’s way too much going on in that thing to be a truly effective label but I think it makes a nice sign.

What got me thinking about this in the first place was the IKEA guy bead that I made and put up on Ebay. I like the IKEA guy. I think he’s well designed and I think his image should be elevated to a work of art. So should warning labels, dog gone it. Now if I could only think of something to warn people about and then draw it and put it on a bead. Yikes. Like everything, this is either going to come to me or not.

Phrases That Suggest Themselves

I got it in my head that I wanted to add text to the painted beads I’ve been working on. I like words a lot so artwork that incorporates text has always been appealing to me. The artwork of Barbara Krueger is a good example of what I’d like to do.

Since the images that I’m using come from collective drawings (see blog entry “Lost School Beads”for more information about collective drawings) it would stand to reason that the accompanying text would also be collective and from the same bunch of weird-o’s. Fortunately, over the years we’ve done as much writing as drawing and saved a considerable amount of it.

Like the drawings, the writing is written in a stream of consciousness fashion. It makes little linear sense but contains lots of tasty little word combinations that everyone can enjoy such as:

or

That’s all I got for text beads so far. What’s unfortunate is that in order to make the words readable they almost have to be written in block letters. Collective writing loses it’s zing when it’s typed because you don’t see all the different handwritings. I think text on the beads is kind of the same way though I’m going to try to work around that. I need text on the beads.

Honest Abe, Two Squids and A Way Out

Well, this week I’m learning reverse painting techniques as outlined in Jim Kervin’s book about Bronwen Heilman. Reverse painting is a technique where you paint a backwards version of a desired image on a piece of glass, fire it and then apply the glass painted side down to a cylindrical bead. This book is an excellent guide for reverse painting and a bunch of other techniques. Every bit of information you need to paint on glass is right there. My problem is that I am a picture-looker more than a careful reader. I think I’m reading carefully but I’m not because I’m too busy thinking about what I want to do. Basically, I have to screw up first before I go back, carefully read the instructions and get it right. That’s just how I learn.

So I think it’s going to take a while, learning this painting thing. Right now I’m focused on wrapping a large piece of sheet glass with a black outlined drawing on it around a bead without it or the bead breaking. I’m not paying much attention to background, I just want to see my little drawing on the bead. (I’m still waiting for UPS to deliver my colored paints, too, so there isn’t much I can do but draw in black and white.)

Many things about this process are blowing my mind. First and foremost is the amount of detail you can render in your drawing and the ease with which you can do this. Before I bought the Kervin book I did not know it was possible to use an ink pen (similar to a fountain pen with a fine point) containing glass paint to draw on glass. I always thought you had to use brushes and since I don’t particularly care for the results I get with brushes I never really wanted to paint on glass. But if I can use a pen I can reproduce whatever I can on paper on glass. That opens up a whole new area of weird images on beads. I can’t stop thinking about it.

The labor intensiveness of this process is another thing that is hard to grasp. Right now my black outline pictures aren’t taking too much time because they only have to be fired once before they’re applied to the bead. Full color paintings like the ones Heilman makes are painted in layers and have to be fired four or more times before applying them to the bead. It does not get any more labor intensive than that…unless you’re also fabricating your own silver bead caps for the beads, which she also does.

So, anyway…it’s been 5 days since my life changed when I realized that you can draw on glass with a pen. Since that time I’ve finished three beads, two of which broke. I also made a bunch of little glass paintings that are waiting for color. Here’s a picture of the first bead I made. It’s the one that did not break.

It’s Abe Lincoln in a tiny car! Of course it is. I’ll tell you all about my choice of subject matter in another post ’cause that’s a whole story in itself. The second bead I made is hideous so I’m skipping to the third. The white core on this one broke and partially healed. I think it’s stable so I’m wearing it.

It’s squids! Since this one has two paint layers, white over black, the glass square had to be fired twice before I risked it’s life wrapping it around the bead. The were numerous other pitfalls besides getting the square of glass (about 2×2″) around this bead. Such as…my white bullseye glass has been getting extremely dirty for no apparent reason. Also, there’s a lot of sludgy stuff around the edges of the glass square. You’re supposed to be able to skim that scum off once you get good enough at this that you’re not absorbed with thoughts about your painting breaking when you’re putting it on the bead. I’m thinking that switching to a darker background might be easier so I’m going to give that a whirl. Stay tuned.