Topic: Another "how did they do that?" thread - carved vase with ? maker's mark

[krsilber]

Adam, that's too bad you don't have images of your panels - for your sake, as well as ours!  I wonder what happened to them.

Tom, I think the wooden positive is a really strong possibility, thanks for suggesting it.  I've been thinking that the texture looks tooled.  I've done some wood carving myself, and can see how that would work.  Even the form of the bowl looks like it was done on a lathe (though I suppose that's nothing new).  I imagine that it was etched some as well, as least to acid polish it, and perhaps to smooth the texture and sharpen the borders of the clear areas (in conjunction with resist).  I think this is my favorite hypothesis yet.

Care to post a photo or two of your wooden pieces from which molds were made?  That would be a nice thing to have in the gallery.  I've got one of the steel etching plates you sold, and another member of the GMB has one, too.  Such a cool piece of glass history to have!

Frank, I agree that the complexity suggests a molded piece.  This doesn't seem the type of work you'd expect a lot of time would have been spent on.  Tooling in conjunction with acid etching (of the mold or glass or both) would account for the complexity as well as the smoothness.  And if it was the positive that was tooled, the mold maker wouldn't have had to work in reverse.  Nifty!

Tom, Adam, and anyone else - I'm still curious about the theoretical feasibility of putting something (clay or plaster or putty?) on the inside of a mold and tooling it.  Just wondering whether it would be possible, not whether it was used in this case.

Thanks everybody for all your input.  You guys are great!  I love this stuff!


...Steven posted while I was writing, that's why this is tacked onto the bottom.

I don't think anyone would argue that it wasn't possible to achieve many kinds of texture with acid.  I think it's more the complexity of the textured bits here that argues for molding.  With acid you typically get different levels of more or less flat (textured) surfaces, whereas this looks like the levels blend into one another.  It may not be impossible to achieve with acid, but it seems like it would be quite difficult.

Even though the marks are very similar, we don't know that they indicate the same maker, although it seems quite likely.  Still, that doesn't mean that the same techniques were used on both pieces.

That one with the fish scale type effect is interesting!  Another one that makes ya think.