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Design of the Month · March 2009 |
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"London Kitchen Door" This design was created to replace two long glazed glass kitchen door panels in my small London Victorian terraced cottage. Since this door connects the kitchen and dining room, I wanted my design to have a kitchen theme that would flow across both panels and also allow plenty of light through since this is an interior door. Although the house is about 120 years old, the original doors had been replaced by a previous owner and I didn't feel constrained to produce or replicate a Victorian design.
There's always a point at which you have to stop drawing and consider the practical possibility of the design. For example, what shapes can be cut, or what extra lines should be put in or removed to strengthen the design. When I first drew the rising steam in the left panel it was one piece of glass -- possible, although difficult, to cut and vulnerable to fracture in a door panel. The solution of making it curl around the spoon made it stronger both structurally and aesthetically. The design does have a few weak structural points, particularly in those parts where a single piece of glass goes right across the panel. With this style of door, this was not a problem as it is kept rigid by the all-round wooden beading that holds the panels in place. I used the Reflect feature of Glass Eye 2000 to construct the symmetrical shapes such as the spoons, the cup and the glass. I drew the left or right profile, selected the shape and then reflected it across the vertical axis. I dragged the two profiles together and the object was complete. I drew the cups upright. To get the necessary orientation I selected the object, chose the Group command to make it quicker to re-select and used the Rotate command to re-orientate it. It was simple to make five copies and position on them design.
~ David Barrat About the artist
David has been working with stained glass for about ten years
and using Glass Eye 2000 for more than five. He was head of a
large
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While creating my design, I had the idea of a kitchen
"still
life" but wanted to avoid being too representational. I spent a
long time on various drafts of this, experimenting with
images of food, kitchen utensils and cooking processes. The
idea of a billowing red and white checkered table cloth that
flowed across both panels kept coming to mind. I added the
sloping lines and the winding column of steam to give the piece
some sense of movement.
I planned to construct the piece using lead came but eventually
chose the copper foil technique because I wanted to keep the
lines
light and fine. In the construction, I did use a grinder
for quite a lot of the shaping of the glass. There are pieces
such as the saucepan drip (#162 and #167), the foot of the glass
(#173) and several others (e.g. #133, #184 and #190) which would not
be possible (at least for me!) to cut precisely with hand tools.
Anyway, I prefer to grind the edges of glass for copper foil
construction because cutting precision is much more critical
with this technique. It also reduces the risk of glass cuts!
The need for precision was most obvious in cutting out the blue
and white stripes and the handles of the cups where each piece had
to bed very closely together.
psychology department in a London college until he retired at
age 56 which has left him more time to work on his hobby. He has
done some commissioned work in southwest France
where he has a second home and he has run courses for local
people in the region of France. He is about to start work with a
group of these trainees in a neighboring village who want to
replace some plain glass panels in a local church with stained glass. David was previously featured in our
