Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Controlled Chaos: Shaping a Glass Octopus”.
I’Ve always loved watching people work with hot glass. It’S it’s simply stunning, it’s beautiful watching it as it heats up and begins to glow, bright orange and turns to liquid it’s like working with lava. Now I personally don’t have access to a hot glass studio, but I wanted to play with hot glass at home and it turns out you can for well under $ 100. So I’m going to show you how to experiment with hot glass work at home by creating this glass octopus, here’s the minimum! You need to get started, map gas, torch or propane, torch, glass, rods, steel rods, and these are dipped in bead release.
You can order this online you’ll need a fiber mat for cooling down and safety glasses. You also need a surface. That’S flameproof! This is going to be a little bit longer video than usual, so I’m just going to jump right into it. I’M starting out by waving the hot or the glass rod in front of the flame. I’Ve got this map gas turned on and you have to wave the rod around in front of the flame to heat it up gradually, if you just pop it right in front of the flame it’ll shatter.
This is thermal shock. I can show you an example of what that looks like and that’s bad. The same thing happens on your actual sculpture. If you let it cool too quickly and they just kind of fall apart and crumble in your hands, it can be really frustrating so here I finally got this warm enough.
You can see that bright orange flame coming off of this, I’m heating up my glass gradually letting it droop and I’m going to slide it on to this steel rod, dipped in bead release and just kind of twist the rod to get a nice beginning there. This is going to be the the part of the octopus where the tentacles attach and I’m going to do this a couple more times to build up the body of the octopus. Now, what I’m seeing while I work on this is different than what you see in the camera here. I don’t actually see this bright, bright orange flame.
Let me show you what I see. I’Ve got these special glasses on those purple ones. You might have noticed in the in the parts listed those purple glasses block this orange flame and that cool alright back to the octopus. So I’ve got a little bit of the body built up here. I’M going to go ahead and just keep on heating up the glass and shifting it around so that I can build up this body now.
Remember this whole time. I have to keep everything warm if it cools down too much it’ll shatter below the octopus. Here you can see a tile that I have that’s flame proof.
It’S it’s fireproof! You want some surface to work on. That’S not going to be damaged, because this hot glass is extremely hot. I’Ll show you what happens here. I’Ll drop a bit on a piece of wood heat it up and let it drip just like water, it hits the wood and you can see immediately.
It starts to burn the wood. This will absolutely wreck your countertops. So here I am back on the octopus. I’M using the flames to melt this down and let it smooth out the surface a bit. I added some ridges on accident’, as I was twisting that glass and I wanted it a little bit more smooth and blobby.
You heat it up, the more you heat it up, the smoother it’ll get, so you can see it’s really hot there. Now I’m going to switch to a much thinner, glass rod or adding details, even though my torch is super duper fat. I can use these smaller rods to add details if you were really doing this seriously.
You’D want to get a smaller torch for adding details, be able to point your flame a little more precisely so I just put on a little bit of a eyebrow Ridge there. So our our octopus can have kind of an eye eye Ridge and make those little eyeballs stand out a little bit better. Now, if you were making these to sell or professionally, you would really want to get a kiln. A kiln would allow you to anneal them.
That’S heating them up to a certain temperature and then slowly cooling them. It makes them very strong. I’M not annealing these, so they’re, pretty fragile. I just put them in the the heat blanket and let them cool down on their own for a few hours. Now I’ve pulled out a yellow rod. Here, I’m going to use to create the eyes again: I’m warming it up. You have to warm it up slowly or else it’ll crack each and every time. So I get this yellow rod, nice and warm.
It changes an interesting orange color as it heats up and I just get the very tip of it. Hot enough to melt and that’s kind of a delicate dance with a big fat torch like I’ve got again. A tiny torch would help considerably here, but this is just for fun, so I’m not too worried about it and there we go. There’S one eyeball, one kind of goofy, looking eyeball and again on the other side for the other eye, and there we go.
I think the yellow on the purple really stands out well, here I’ve switched to a real skinny rod of green to add little pupils to the eyes, just a little dab that’ll. Do it melt that down to smooth it out a bit? I like to add these little these little nubs all over the body on these octopus. The way they stick out, I think it’s cool looking really organic.
I do that just by heating up these thin rods, and just touching it on over and over and over in comes the fun part. When making octopus, you got to make tentacles, which are really fun to make they’re cool, but you can do it eight times and I have to repeat your work over and over here. I’Ve stuck a thin rod on and I’m using the entire rod just twisting it and curling it around and make a really kind of windy and curly tentacle. Then I pull off the end of it there and there we go there’s a tentacle. Now I got to do this seven more times these little glass rods, wear down pretty quick.
You can run out now, as you get down to the end. Your fingers are pretty safe, they don’t transmit heat pretty very well, so you can get pretty close to your fingers, but ultimately you can’t use the entire glass rod one way to get around. That is to combine two of them together, just to be able to keep using your spare glass you’ll notice that I go pretty slow. I heat this up.
I let it cool down. I heat it up. I let it cool down back and forth. All the while trying to keep the octopus itself warm enough to keep from shattering it’s delicate. Now, if you heat up these legs too much and pull you get these little wispy hair like legs that are extremely fragile.
My first few ended up like this I’ll speed. Things up a bit, so you don’t have to sit through real time. All eight tentacles here we go slapping the last ones on there you can see I’m having to be very careful. Sometimes the splash over from my big fat flame here, can cause the tentacles adjacent to the ones I’m working on to melt and that’s no fun. But again this was just for fun. So there we go, and here is here’s the last tentacle going on right here and our little octopus is done after it’s sat in the fiber blanket for a few hours to cool down, you can take it out, grab a hold of the octopus and twist the Steel rod to pull it out, I’ve already removed this one so that I could play with it there you go, there’s a lot of fun and that’s just one example of the kind of stuff you can do for pretty cheap at home with hot glass.
You can find everything you need by just looking for a simple glass bead, making kit on Amazon or anywhere online, although you should try a local stained, glass or hot glass studio to support local artists. Let’S take a few seconds to look at some of the comments from last time, when I made the giant inflatable tentacles the geek pub says the lighting makes all the difference and it really does in the video I showed green LED lighting, because that’s what the camera Can pick up the best, but really red lights, looked fantastic. Benjamin Allen says what I saw of the Slenderman was actually really neat.
I think you just need to make a couple more attempts yeah. Actually, it wasn’t quite as ridiculous as I made it out to be on its own. I mean it looked okay, but I used really thick plastic and the legs were super skinny. So I couldn’t use boxing box fans, so I had to use a leaf blower, which was insanely loud. You can talk anywhere near it. It couldn’t stand up on its own.
I had to tie it to the house and hang it from a tree and do all that stuff. Really, though, the lesson is that you should experiment and see what kinds of crazy stuff you can make with this method. If you do any kind of glass work at home, I’d love to see what you’re making in the comments below be sure to subscribe for more videos from make. If you liked this video subscribe to our website or send us a comment on Facebook or Twitter be sure to check out our other project, videos or visit us on make zine calm.
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