Big Jelly Marble

So I had a hankering to make a really BIG jellyfish, like a large clear marble with a jellyfish in the core and a mantle of dichro. Unfortunately my ambition as usual exceeded my skill level :-) but I did manage to take some flattering pics of the resulting marble. It is not so bad really, except for a real mess where the ends of the strip of dichro did not really join together right (and the dichro scummed and bubbled and made a mess. I tried to hide that part in the photos!

Flash Photo	Flash 2 Dichro Shine	Mixed Light Internal Jelly	Sunlight Internals	Sunlight 2
Sunlight 3	Sunlight 4 MultiColours	Sunlight 5	Sunlight 6 The Canopy	Sunlight 7 Bubbles
Mixed Light 2	Mixed Light 3

I took a lot of shots of this piece because I was fascinated by how different it looked in different lights and from different angles. It became clear to me that it's very difficult to present any accurate picture of a piece of glass art in a flat photo! a short stream of video might be far more realistic.

This marble had a transparent multicoloured core -- blues and purples and clear -- that wouldn't round up properly for me. I got frustrated, threw it back in the kiln, added the dichro and a couple of shroomy inclusions, and encased it up to a larger size. It rounded better at the larger size, but it's still a very flawed piece. I would call it a proof of concept rather than a marble. The dichro was a very thin film, which had a pleasing diaphanous final effect but was a nightmare to handle; and all the edges of the dichro strip scummed and curled. Also the dichro was deformed by the pressure of the encasing clear glass, which gave the canopy a wavering shape that I hadn't intended.

At any rate, my real ambition in marble-land is to make transparent marbles with interesting insides, and this is one baby step in that direction.

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Created on Sun Sep 10 11:10:39 2000