Glass Bead Flame Designs: Occlusion Technique Basics

Video Transcript

"Looks pretty good, fairly equal, fairly evenly spaced. So I have six turquoise dots laid down on a rim, a ring of ivory. Set onto a base of topaz, transparent topaz. I will now come in with a factory made ivory stringer about three millimeters. You can certainly make these yourself, but the cost of the affectery glass even for stringers is roughly the same. It's sold by pounds so once you have practiced stringer making and you can do it yourself, it's a great time savings and convenience to buy commercially prepared stringers. And I'm going to make a what I call a sort of a swept wing design. I'm going to put these ivory dots in a succession of kind of angled lay downs. Setting them down in an offset manner. Going back to the first few, bulking them up. Heating those guys in a little bit before I go to the other side. Checking my work, adding a little more. It's a funny thing when adding dots like this the glass swells when it's really hot. And as it cools it kind of shrinks down. It's not quite as tumescent. And you kind of have to look at what you've done and maybe go back, so a dot that you thought was ample and full, kind of looks maybe skimpy when looking at it a second time when it's cooler. As they do swell as they're hot. Now I'm going to do the other side, also offset, also at this kind of angling. It's kind of magical too, to see what happens. Because the next stage after this will be a complete transformation of the appearance of the bead as we melt down those ivory dots. Right before our eyes. We'll have something completely different then what we see right now. And some of you might say, well that's really neat can we just leave it like that Harlan, and you could, you certainly could. You want to melt these dots in, you know so they're not necessarily flush, we could just sort of spot heat them, spot heat, spot heat, spot heat, you can control how much you bring them down onto the body or base of the bead. You can control that. You can just leave them nice and cooked on like that, and that would be really pretty, in and of itself. As the color returns you'll see it's just sort of a nice, nice pretty little nub bead, kind of turbine kind of swirl pattern in the turquoise color zones. But that's not where we're going to stop, we're going to actually melt those nubs down all the way. And we'll get them flush with the turquoise main cells. And this will illustrate the power and beauty of occlusion or masking. Go slow here, pull back from the heat, do this in two or three stages to maintain sort of a crisp line. Maybe go further out to keep the again the distinctiveness of the pattern. Slower is better. Keeps the glass from bleeding too much. Bleeding is not bad, it's just gives you a fuzzes, a fuzzy look. And there's already been some amount of that especially given the ivory that we used. Ivory is one of those colors that fuzzes out. And you've got lots of organic effects with it. But you can kind of see now there is sort of this winged dog bone pattern, really pretty. And that's occlusion. "