Sandblasting Glass

I recently took a class at Pratt that taught a particular technique for transferring images onto glass.  It allowed me to finally get this particular idea out of my head and DONE.

This is a window from the nose of a B-17.  It's about 1 foot wide at the widest part by about 2 feet tall.  It was going to meet with an uncertain fate, so it was given to me when I said I'd do something with it.

Back side

 I had this idea to put the image of a B-17 onto it, maybe an image that looks as it would have if you were flying in one B-17 and looking out of this window at another B-17.

I started with an archival photo of a B-17 that I edited the heck out of to have a very high-contrast image that I liked.

I had to decide whether I wanted the black or the white parts of the image to be the sandblasted areas, so I did a couple of test pieces -

I decided that the shadows/dark areas would be the masked parts and the white would be sandblasted.  I made this masking stencil by processing my image on UV sensitive masking film, then placed the sticky masking film image where I wanted it on the window and masked off the frame and back of the window to protect those areas from being blasted.

And into the sandblaster -

This is the sandblasted image, with the masking film still on.

And a couple of detail shots with the mask washed off -

I was super excited to give this to my dad for his birthday.  It's now HIS job to figure out how to mount it for display.

In the future I will share pictures of a couple other experiments that took my sandblasting on glass in totally different directions...