The Art of Joy Alyssa Day

It's the singular quote we hear more often from people who see our larger pieces of artwork. "Wow, it's just like Chihuly!" I used to get a little miffed at that comment, because our works are NOT just like Chihuly. Our works are our own and usually meant to depict something in particular, like the Solar System. From the many pieces I've seen of his works, they're a conglomeration of lots of littler pieces into a giant swirly piece. It's the sheer magnitude of all the pieces put together that makes it so dramatic. And *he* doesn't even do all the work himself. We do all our own work!

I got to thinking that for the past several months, I've been discussing the failures with that sink job, both on here and on my Facebook/Twitter accounts. I've gotten comments that maybe I shouldn't spend my time making sinks. Well, it isn't that I *can't* make sinks, it's that I couldn't make *those* sinks as they had to fit a very precise position in the client's countertop.

After working for a number of months, in vain, trying to create two matching cast glass sinks for a client, that would fit into her already made countertop, she canceled the project. I was having failure after failure with those darned sinks - getting the colors to match what she wanted, then trying to get the cast piece to drop through a mold to the right shape for her countertop, faucet and knobs.

It was only a matter of time before our skills producing the blown glass planets for our mobiles, orrery, sculptures and ornaments would join up with our new line of wine bottle stoppers.

The new jewelry line came about fairly rapidly, but the website for them took a little longer (isn't that always the case?). The site is now LIVE! - http://glasssculpture.org/artglass/jewelry/

We decided to add it to our Glass Sculpture site, since the technique doesn't match up with my Reverse Glass painting, nor does it follow the techniques used in the art glass marbles & paperweights.

As we continue our orrery project, it is time to blow the glass planets. As the whole piece is only 6 feet in diameter, that means we have less than 3 feet to fit in 8 planets (they didn't want Pluto).  To get the planets to fit, be relative scale (impossible to be "actual" scale), and not clunk into each other, the inner planets need to be fairly small.

I made my own gear yesterday!!  I'm so proud of it I could just burst.

A little background - I'm building on orrery (model of the solar system) for the astronomy department of a college in San Mateo, CA.  We've built similar things, but of course, every new project requires new skills and stuff that we've never done before. For this piece, called Celestial Gears, it is going to be motorized with a computer driving the planets with correctly timed orbits. The whole piece is 6 feet in diameter.

While we were at the National Space Symposium, a next door exhibitor asked if we could put together some small awards for students. The catch was he didn't have much time. I came back to the studio and looked around for something that I had already in stock that would do well as awards, but I only had two or three of each appropriate thingie, and he needed 5 - 4 regular sized and one a bit larger.

I wanted to experiment with my sandblasting and deep carving on glass. My cast glass pieces are usually in the 3/8-1/2 inch thick range, with the colors swirling through the entire depth of the piece. This would make for some great carving, as some of the colors would be opened up, while others would remain untouched.

Previous posts have focused on the rocket that is the center column for our orrery. The one pictured here doesn't have the bottom section with the fins, but our new one does. Now that the rocket has been carved and the holes bored into it to accept the drive tubes, it can be put aside for a bit and we move on to the next section - The arms.