Posted by Mike Jackson on October 24, 2003
Karen SartainHere's a post I made a couple of weeks ago after Robare's post about Rawson and Evans. Some people may have missed it, so I moved it to the top this morning. Also, I knocked out some extra nodes (a result of the older software I used 8 or 9 years ago) and the file size is about half of its original. Mike
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Hi all,
At one of the early conclaves, Rick had enlarged a photo of the United Cigar signs on his photocopier for people to use as a project piece. People wanting to do the project had to hand transfer the design to sandblast stencil...seems like we used seril paper (colored tracing paper). I did mine, and cut it all by hand like everyone else. Of course it took a lot of time and effort. When I headed back to the small sandblast unit to frost it for the pre-chip step, Butch Anton was already using the booth. For some reason, I needed to be somewhere else at the time, and Butch volunteered to frost mine as soon as he finished his project. Not blaming Butch, he somehow broke my piece.
I couldn't stand to sit there and cut another but I took my pattern sheet home. I had made the comment earlier that I could digitize the artwork faster than I could cut it, so I DID digitize it. Somewhere along the way, I sent the digitized artwork to Rick and I think it was used by other people off and on over the years.
When we were gearing up to do our glass art, we used that design as a test piece shown above. Rawson and Evans would have used silver, but we were trying our first angel gilding and I was determined to get the process down. I think we made ten of that piece.
As a side note, I digitized a LOT of the Rawson and Evans ornamental elements which make up the bulk of Main Street Collection of Panels and Ornaments.
If you want to download the 275k United Cigar Illustrator 3.0 file and make your own Rawson and Evans sign, click on the link below. I am pretty certain this will work...but if not maybe I can get it to work later. At least you will know "the rest of the story" as to how that design came about! (In case your browser wants to change the extension to .PS, just save the file like this "unitedcigar.ai") After saving the file, you should be able to open or import it into about any program.
Mike Jackson
http://www.theletterheads.com/pub/unitedcigar.ai
Mike JacksonWow..beautiful work Mike..thanks for sharing
Karen & Jeff
Jeffrey P. LangHere's an interesting photo group. The one on the left is the one we did about 8 years ago. The one in the middle is a photo of the actual Rawson and Evans piece, and the one on the right is a piece that Jeff Lange just sent me. He used the downloaded file, cut it out of Gerber Mask, and chipped one already. Cool!
The original piece had a bright silver line and ornaments. We reversed the chipped areas when we tried the project. I think it was more common for Rawson and Evans to chip the backgrounds, leaving the ornamental parts as bright glass.
Enjoy!
Mike Jackson
I couldn't wait to finish that piece. Being new to chipping glass, the excitement level is still very high. I attended a small impromptu workshop on glue chipping & gilding glass given by Bob Hovanec, Pat Kerr & Bill Beckner, a few weekends ago. About a dozen or so of us made a few samples of chipped pieces with simple artwork to get a n introduction to the technique. That was very helpful, as it was not too intimidating. We used asphaltum on the glass before we blasted the stencil, which was GerberMask. The glue mixture was a 1/1 ratio & seemed to do a nice job chipping. Only having done a few pieces, I don't know what normal chipping is yet, but these sample pieces are a great way to find out & wonderful display for the showroom. When I put the glue on, I was a little sloppy, so cutting the glue after it gelled was necessary. I thought it would be a good idea to angle the xacto blade when cutting to try & emulate the curve of glue as it naturally flows out instead of straight. Maybe someone experienced could tell how they cut their glue overlaps.
The digitized artwork that Mike provided worked out great, the outline that I applied cut very clean & consistant so painting the background was a breeze.
One thing I thought was interesting Bob Hovanec had told me was how Rawson & Evans supposedly blended their panels. They sprayed a thin coat of asphaltum blending it from slight color to clear so when the background color was applied, a nice even blend was achieved. I'll have to try that some time to see how it works out.
I basically finished the piece to duplicate just how Mike finished his panel, the first one on the left in the previous post.
Thanks again Mike for sharing, I'm hoping to do more.
Later,
Jeff
Kent Smith
Vance GalliherFYI the second Brinhuser piece Rick and I did was blended with asphaltum as described.
imported just fine !.....thanks mike, vance
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