Well, you might be surprised at how complex a mere etching job can be. Some of my favorite and most challenging jobs have been surface etching jobs. To start with, think of any graphic that is 2 dimensional. And 2D graphic, whether simple or detailed, is focused on the mask. Whatever is masked off remains clear and whatever is exposed is frosted. Sandblasted. Etched. Then if you want to take it a step further, you may peal up certain parts of your masked areas, then etch those freshly exposed areas with a half-frost. That is sort of like adding another color (or another shade of grey). Now, to take that to yet another level, say you are an air-brush artist. Whip out your air-brush thinking and apply it to etching. The sandblaster is your airbrush….the glass is your black paper….and the sandblast abrasive is you white paint. That is a whole rhelm to master all by itself. Then you start collecting all kinds of screen materials in order to inject a lot of detail in your etching without having to work for it. A great example of this could be….say you want to etch a beautiful butterfly in great detail on a piece of glass. You want it to be 6 inches tall. Well, you put your vinyl film down on the glass and start drawing your butterfly. You draw the body, the head, the antennae, the outline of the wings. Then you draw all of the beautiful detail in the wings. As you go to cut out all of those components, you will spend a lot more time cutting out those little details in the wings than you did everything else. Then you start weeding your vinyl and etching your butterfly. How much better if you cut only the body, the head, the outline of the wings. Then after you etch those components, you weed the wings, then hold up a piece of sea coral over the wing areas of the butterfly, then make a quick pass with you sandblaster and you get ALL of that detail without having to Draw, Cut-out or Weed your vinyl. And it took one second. Once you catch on to the possibilities, you start collecting every kind of screen material that you run across. And some of your favorite screens are going to be things that you can’t buy. Things that you found on the side of the road. Screen material that was actually part of a filter of some sort. Or part of a machine. Your screen collection will become very important to you. Theeeen we get into the area of liquid resist products. Another whole rhelm to explore. So, we took my dozen years as an airbrush artist, then added that to my 4 decades of being a glass artist and I can honestly tell you that we have just scratched the surface! The exploration never ends. And it never grows old. Glass is fascinating! But, Nuff’ Said 4 Now!
