Catherine Cheek

Catherine "Kater" Cheek is a writer and artist.

Author's posts

Next-To Last Beetles

So now I figured out that you have to fuse the dichro to the background glass before you cap it.  Here’s what I also found–when you have iridescent glass in the background, the dichro doesn’t fuse completely flat. That means that even when you fuse it before capping it, you get blisters of air trapped …

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New and Improved Beetles

These are more of my dichroic beetles, which I also fused before I realized that they would have blisters of trapped air in them.  Some of them have iridescent glass as a background, which does weird things to the glass on top of it. I’ll explain more in the next post.

New Beetles

I liked my other beetles, but they really needed dichroic class. Dichroic glass looks like beetle’s wings, one of the most beautiful things in nature, and I had to combine them. First, I made the legs by cutting masking tape, lifting the positive, spraying with hairspray, and dusting it with mica pigments.  When I lifted …

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Butterflies

Now that I’d done a few beetles, I decided to see if I could make a butterfly that looked okay. Butterflies are easy to do poorly, and hard to do well. I find that if I stray too far from a photograph or good drawing of a butterfly, it doesn’t look as real as I’d …

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First Beetles

At this point in the class, I decided to just go and buy some more clear glass. If you ever take a glass fusing class, be aware that you will likely use more clear glass than any other color, for capping dichro if nothing else. I hadn’t yet tested the mica pigments yet, so the …

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