Using Clear Glass to Create Mosaics

Video Transcript

"When you do use clear glass, you want to back it because you don’t want to see the glue and the base surface through the glass. And this is a piece that I cut off of that and now I’m going to back this piece. And you can use an expensive foil from a stained glass company, or you can go to a hardware store and use electrician tape that has aluminum and aluminum backing, and that’s what I did. And so you take- you want it to be…you peel the backing off and you decide what side you want to- generally you want the wavy side up and the smooth side down. So I will put the backing on the smooth side which will be down on the underside of the glass. And then I want to trim these edges. You can either tear it with your fingers or cut it off with scissors. And then you don’t want the edges to come above the thickness of the glass. So now, I have the aluminum secured onto the back of the glass. And you can do just that which cause a reflection. Now, the reason you don’t want your whole piece to have clear glass is because you don’t want the whole piece to be like a mirror. This would be a special accent. After you have backed it, another thing you can do is burnish the glass. And what you do is you use a sharp object and you simply draw into the aluminum. And you do a random pattern. Or, in some of my pieces, I did a repetitive pattern, depending on what your application is. And it takes quite a bit of- you have to go over it quite a bit to get a good burnishing. And then you kind of smooth it out and do it some more so it’s multilayered. Ok, so we’ll see what that looks like. "