Genius Hour Week 3 - Elevator Pitch

Elevator Pitch

This week’s accomplishment

Due to shortage of time during weekdays, decided to start working on the Glass Relief and Cold Enamel

part of the project in parallel thinking it wouldn’t take as much time as the clay work.

For Glass Relief - 

• Clean the round mirror
• Draw the preferred design on it using a dry erase marker
• Mix equal parts of Apoxie clay and make thin coils. I added a little black pigment to make the clay black. 
• Apply a little glue over the design and paste the coils onto them
• Make sure there is no gap between the clay and mirror
• Wait for the clay to completely dry (though the clay dries in about 2 hours it is safer to wait for 24 hours)
• It is now time to add colors to it, but as I was planning to use the same coloring technique for the cold enamel project, decided to wait till that was ready too

For Cold Enamel - 

• Cut the cardboard to the desired shape. Draw the design and glue thin clay coils to it. Leave it to dry for 24 hours
• Cut the copper foil to the same shape as the cardboard leaving extra to fold in
• Apply glue to both the cardboard and the foil. Place the foil on top of the designed cardboard and using a rounded tool slowly push it in starting from inner to outer
• When done fold the extra edges behind and glue

The foil did tear at places due to carelessness. I just left it as such as I was planning to pour resin colors onto them. Hoping they will hold up well and won’t soak into the cardboard.

The next step is to color both the above work. This is where the epoxy resin and glass colors come to use. Epoxy resin comes in two parts.

• Clean the glass/mirror again to clear all the excess glue and fingerprints. Otherwise they show up in the final result.
• Add wholeless beads to the part of the glass that is not going to be colored.
• Mix equal quantities of both parts of the resin well.
• Separate the mixed resin to different containers so as to mix the desired colors to it.
• Depending on the intensity of the color needed add 2 to 5 drops of the required glass color to each container and mix well.
• Here I have used yellow, green, brown, blue and clear for the glass and red green, yellow for the foil.
• Pour the desired color in each shape. If the clay hasn’t been glued completely to the glass, the resin will seep into the next shape.
• To give a shaded effect, pour both colors of choice and mix them gently with a toothpick.
• Pour clear resin onto the part with the beads.
• Bubbles do form when resin is poured. Used a needle to release the air in the bubble. Otherwise they dry as such.
• Once the resin has been poured, do not move the pieces for about 24 hours until they are completely dry.

Resin dries very quickly. So it was imperative that I work really fast for this. Inspite of working fast, resin started become thicker and difficult to pour towards the end.  Wasn't able to take as many pictures as I would have liked.

Everything I worked on this week was new to me. It was an interesting learning experience.