Tiki bar sign

[Paige Howarth]

Hi all! I just wanted to share a glass project I recently finished. Half my basement is a print shop and the other half is a tiki bar (yes, I spend a lot of time in the basement.) I decided to try my hand at a large glass piece for behind the bar.

It is clearly a total amateur job , but I'm proud of the end result, and looking forward to future projects. I can't thank the contributors here enough for the vast amount of knowledge shared on this forum!

Sorry for the lousy pics; the lighting is (mercifully) low in the bar. The water and word "Pineapple" are glue chipped. There are areas of solution silver, water gilding, and a screened pattern border, but most of it was reverse painted oils backed with aluminum leaf.

Thanks for looking, and feel free to drop by for a mai tai if you're passing through Connecticut.

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[Dan Seese]

It doesn't look like an amateur job to me, Paige. Nicely done!
Thank you for sharing it.

[Paige Howarth]

Dan, thanks for the kind words. Your work continues to be a great inspiration to folks like me.

Looking forward to working on more glass projects as the looming New England Winter forces me to tinker indoors.

Paige

[Lee Littlewood]

Pretty hot stuff there. The border looks quite interesting - any good pix of it?

If you silkscreen in your basement, how do you exhaust the fumes? Enquiring minds want to know...

[Paige Howarth]

Thanks lots Lee. Attached are a couple border and screen pics. I'd sandblasted it, but after back-painting the etching ended up being really subtle. I also gilded a 1/2" border up to the etched edge - a paper cutter worked out well for making thin strips.

The printed border is a fijian tapa pattern I had vectorized for an earlier project. When printing oil- or rubber-base inks downstairs I run two squirrel-cage blowers that vent outside. This setup works well for cigar & pipe smoke too. Honestly, most of my volume screenprinting is on paper with water-based inks.

I mixed a real frankenstein ink: slow size and white oil paint with a few drops each of japan dryer and penetrol. This seemed to adhere and yielded the transparency I wanted, with the viscosity of letterpress ink: thick and sticky as honey and stringy as bubblegum. And it wasn't about to dry in the screen. I did have to do some touch-ups.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Paige

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