Introduction
The Zenith project is the assignment where you strive to reach the upper limits of your capability as a creative and a Freestyle student, where you attempt to make the most arduous yet fufilling journey to create your best work. This could be a short film, character design, or creating jewlery. I chose to do something I’ve always wanted to do: makign stained glass from scratch. This would mean needing a wide variety of tools and using a large array of skills, but would be very fun to complete. Ever since I visited Europe and saw some of the beautiful handmade pieces there, I wanted to do this, despite the apparent skill and strength of will required. I also decided to do this since my elective is Design, so designing the glass patterns to fit a theme would match my elective’s goal.
Proccess
The overall process of making stained glass goes from cutting the pieces out, to grinding off excess glass for the pattern, to sticking copper foil ontio the edges of each individual piece, and finally soldering the pieces together into the product.
In addition to working on our projects, we created and presented a slideshow about our project to our peers. Below is the recording of my final presentation about this stained glass journey of Harmony and Strife.
Product
Reflection
For my Zenith project, I chose to make stained glass because it’s a new medium I could apply my design skills to, has unique challenges, and is something I’ve always wanted to do, especially since my Explorations project. In order to decide on theming, I thought of themes with heavy symbolism befitting of the medium, and found war and peace, or later titled Harmony and Strife, to be a good juxtaposition between the two pieces I would create. Primarily using the symbolism of a rising sun and moon in my Harmony piece and the symbols of a sword, target, and laurel wreath helped to develop themes of change happening because of peace and war being a self-centered idea. Even though I wan’t inspired by any specific artists, I did do some research for the process of creating a piece and the tools I’d need. My classmates were incredibly helpful in giving advice for my design and technique, even though we weren’t partners for the project. I think the skill I most developed was my self-direction. Having a two-month period where I was entirely guided by my own deadlines and goals has really helped me develop my ability to understand how to work by myself. I think that I’m definitely going to use this medium again, since I now have the supplies, but experiencing repeated failure, such as breaking around five pieces of glass, and overcoming it is an ability I’ll make the most of in future projects. Through this project, my goal of igniting my passion for creating unique art using unique mediums has been fully realized, and I hope to continue using new art forms. Ultimately, I feel like I did this project very well for a beginner in making stained glass, and I think anything I could change are things developed through experience, like smooth solder lines, cutting glass closer to the pattern, and even foiling. The most important thing I learned from this project was that even though technique and experience is important, ultimately the joy one derives from their work leads to the greatest success of all.