Designing a Japan-Inspired Fused Glass Ornament

Projects

Sep 4

Drawing From Experience

Technically, I don’t take commissions outside of pet and wedding portraits. However, every once in a while a client will approach me with a proposal that tugs at my artistic inclinations too strongly to refuse. In this case I was hooked by a request for a Japan-inspired ornament.

I’ve been intrigued by Japanese culture since my early teens, when I used to make a habit of surfing fashion blogs, and stumbled across one dedicated to Harajuku street style.

I was enamored immediately; Harajuku fashion was so creative and fantastical that it seemed more like art than clothing, and I had to know more about the place where it started.

I was soon spending the majority of my free time buried deep in study of countless other fascinating cultural aspects of Japan, from geishas and teahouses, to samurai and katanas, to dragon-adorned shrines (it’s been rumored that my obsession is actually what sparked Gwen Stefani’s '“Harajuku Girls” to hit the scene several years later).

Fast-forward a few life phases, and I found myself there in person with my recently-acquired husband on our honeymoon! We spent three weeks exploring every inch of Japan we could, delighting in all of its beautifully alien aspects.

Here are a few highlights:

Tanuki figurines, placed outside doorways as a symbol of good luck

Unique treasures of common vending machines

Deer biting Honorable Husband for not feeding them fast enough

One of the many beautiful shrines scattered about Tokyo

Honorable Husband modeling a yukata, the traditional garb worn to hot springs

Watching the Natsu Basho Sumo Tournament at the Kokugikan arena

Honorable Husband battling locals at the Tokyo Samurai Museum

Putting Ideas to Paper

I sketched several rough design drafts to get an idea of which potential elements and layouts would work best. Then I narrowed it down to just a few that I felt would best fit the client’s vision while also staying true to my artistic voice and posing an interesting execution challenge.

This piece would need to be made entirely from fused glass as opposed to leaded stained glass due to the complexity of detail I planned to incorporate.

A pencil on a sketchpad depicting rough drawings of Japan-themed ornament designs — *Rough pencil sketches of potential Japan-themed ornament designs*

I digitized my top three drafts into formal patterns and sent them to the client for feedback along with potential color palettes.

A digitally stylized design of a Japanese pagoda ornament — *Digital designs of Japan-themed ornaments (note that I’ve stylized the patterns here to protect from potential copyright infringement)*

A digitally stylized design of a Japanese torii gate ornament

A digitally stylized design of a swimming koi ornament

The client chose the design with the red and black archway below a clouded moon. This archway is known as a torii, which is a symbolic gateway marking the entrance to the sacred precincts of a Shintō shrine in Japan, and is meant to demarcate the boundary between the secular world and the sacred spirit world.

Going For a Test Run

Kilnforming glass is both an art and a science, and it’s always a collaborative effort between the artist and the medium. Even when every step of a fusing project is performed with the utmost care and precision, the glass itself becomes an active participant while it melts, sometimes resulting in wildly unexpected deviations from the plan.

Because of this, I take the time to perform small sample tests at the start of every new fusing project to observe whether the glass will behave and look as I expect it to during each stage of the process. I’ve learned the hard way that there are few things more frustrating than putting hours of effort into a piece only to have it ruined in the final fuse due to an unforeseen color change, position shift, bubble formation, etc.

Pencil drawing depicting the setup of fused glass sample tests — *Outline of samples set up to test the ornament’s structure and color palette*

In this case, I wanted to create the ornament’s background with a single in-line layer of glass to keep it as lightweight as possible, but I’d never tried fusing a circle within a ring before. I wasn’t sure if that strategy would result in a crisp, clean border or if it would look better to fuse two solid circles in a stack instead.

I also wanted to confirm which glass colors would make for the best bamboo stalks, and how far apart each stalk segment should be spaced to prevent them from melting into one other.

I set up three test samples to confirm my uncertainties:

Border Sample A: A white circle in-line with a black ring
Border Sample B: A white circle centered on top of a slightly larger black circle
Bamboo Sample: Bamboo stalks of various colored glass scrap and frit, spaced at differing intervals

A white stained glass circle centered within a black stained glass ring — *Border sample A, pre-firing*

A white stained glass circle centered on top of a slightly larger black stained glass circle — *Border sample B, pre-firing*

A white scrap of stained glass with various colored stained glass bits on top, forming bamboo stalks — *Bamboo sample, pre-firing*

Post-firing, I saw that the in-line ring background strategy was indeed feasible, and that the bamboo segments could be spaced as close as 1mm apart without their melting together.

A white stained glass circle fused in the center of a black stained glass ring — *Border Sample A, post-firing*

A white stained glass circle fused on top of a slightly larger black stained glass circle — *Border Sample B, post-firing*

A white scrap of stained glass with various colored stained glass bits fused top, forming bamboo stalks — *Bamboo sample, post-firing*

Hang On…Is That Torii Up to Code?

As I was about to begin work on the actual ornament, another aspect of the design caught my eye and made me feel one last sample test was needed.

Specifically, I was side-eyeing those two horizontal beam segments in my torii drawing and wondering,

“Will the thin vertical segment underneath prop up their centers enough to prevent them from drooping, or will they need additional support?”

A pencil sketch of a torii gate ornament design, with the center beam segments circled in red — *Rough draft of my torii gate ornament design structure, with concerning beam areas circled*

I went back to my scraps and built a very rough torii structure that included two horizontal beams:

A topmost beam, the middle of which is supported by a thin vertical segment
A bottommost beam, the middle of which is supported by a long horizontal segment running nearly the width of the beam

While I was at it, I also placed black square pillar bottoms in differing positions to see which post-fuse style I preferred.

Red and black pieces of stained glass arranged on a scrap of white to create a rough torii gate structure, as viewed from above — *Torii gate structure test sample, pre-firing, viewed from above*

Red and black pieces of stained glass arranged on a scrap of white to create a rough torii gate structure, as viewed from the side — *Torii gate structure test sample, pre-firing, viewed from the side*

Post-firing, there was indeed a slight droop to the topmost horizontal beam whereas the bottommost one remained very straight.

The resulting curvature was slight enough not to impact the overall look, so I felt confident moving forward with the single vertical segment structure. However, a more intense firing schedule would likely cause a more severe droop, so I made a note not to go above the one used for this test sample with the actual ornament.

Red and black pieces of stained glass fused on top of a scrap of white to create a rough torii gate structure — *Torii gate structure test sample, post-firing*

With a tried-and-true approach in place for all the key components of this piece, I was confident to start on the real thing!

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A friendly reminder that I share details of my creation processes with the intent of empowering people with knowledge and techniques that may help them reach their full creative potential, not with the intent of enabling other artists to recreate my pieces. All of my designs are protected by copyright and are illegal to reproduce, reuse, or republish without my permission under any circumstances.

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Jackie Knowles https://www.GlassworkPixie.com