Month: April 2018

Habitat for Humanity – Restore Painted Door Auction – Bangor, ME

Posted on by Nancy Tang

I’ve been working on a door for the Habitat for Humanity  Restore Painted Door Auction and wanted to share the progress & process so far.  I’ve got to do this outside because it’s too large for my studio, (read that as – I have no clear table space left because I live in chaos) and the weather has been bad. I got one good day the other day and finished sanding and priming the door, and began the actual painting. The deadline is quickly approaching so I’m working in the garage on these rainy days.

For some reason this project has begun an obsession with Koi for me and I’ve also created 2 pieces in kiln fired and glass enamel pieces featuring koi. This is the largest painting I’ve ever done, my back is a wreck from leaning over, but I’m having a great time with it!

The door was sanded and primed with house paint. The painting itself is created with acrylic paint and will be sealed with acrylic sealer.

The door is not finished yet but here’s the progress:

 

Habitat for Humanity Restore, Bangor, ME

Glass Art – Koi Pond using Glass Enamels

Posted on by Nancy Tang

This week I’ve been working on this glass art piece of a koi pond using enamels for glass. I’ve never worked with this material before but I am really enjoying it and like the effect.  The image shows the piece after the first firing, with the second layer of glass enamel applied. Just waiting to be fired again.

 

Glass Art piece - A 9" glass disc with koi pond
Glass Art – Koi Pond, 9″ disc.

The Process

First I create a drawing on the high fire paper (the paper that acts as a kiln separator to keep the glass from sticking to the kiln shelf), then I begin to add the details using the glass enamel mixed with a medium to make it paint-like. I also use the enamel as a powder as you may notice in this image (you can see the green ‘dust’ on the water.) I’ve fired this piece twice, with layers of enamel added each time, to get the desired effect. I might fire them anywhere from 2-5 times depending oh how they come out.

This is a great way to create glass art that has a more painterly feel. The possibilities seem endless when creating kiln fired glass art!

I will display the piece in a metal stand when completed.

Check out more of my art at NancyDaviesTang.com

I’ve also been working on a project for Habitat for Humanity that you might like to see HERE.

 

Nancy Davies Tang. Title:  Koi Pond. Medium: Kiln fired glass and glass enamels. Price: $450

 

The high price of ignorance – Google Jail

Posted on by Nancy Tang

Google Jail

Back in 2013 I used a free template to create a nice look on my website. The free template included stock clip art that was also listed on free clip art websites. I had fully intended to replace the clip art with my own photos but didn’t get around to replacing one of them. It was the photo of a woman’s face. Life got busy and I really let my website drift for about 5 years. Recently I’ve ported GlassOrchids over here to wordpress, whole new host, whole new website. In trying to gain placement in the search engines I discovered that way back in 2013 the owner of that photo reported dozens of web pages/sites, that also used that photo perhaps also in free templates, for copyright infringement.

In researching I’ve discovered that I’m now in Google jail and it’s a life sentence. There is no way to remove oneself from Google jail if, in fact, you actually did have the illegal image/content on your page at any time.

Some of my pages are indexed in Google but not my home page, which is where the photo was.  I’ve spent hours researching how to fix this. I can’t believe Google has no way of re-indexing a page, i.e. removing you from google jail, but they don’t. Apparently they used to, but creeps who intentionally use copyrighted material kept getting out of jail and then adding the copyrighted material right back to their pages. So once again, the jerks in the world are why we can’t have nice things.

I’ve had glassorchids.com for about 20 years or so. Now there is no way for me to have it re-indexed with Google so it will not come up in the search engines; most of my pages will but not the home page. That’s a high price to pay for ignorance.

I’m working on some workarounds and have registered GlassOrchidZ.com … well I do love zombies so I guess in a way this is the undead version of GlassOrchids.   It will take a lot of time as I’ll have to recreate the site from scratch…at least part of it, and figure out how to redirect a site/page. I’ll keep you posted on progress.

Let this be a lesson to all of you out there – beware of any free graphics/templates etc… the real price can be very high.

Live and learn,

~Nan

UPDATE: I think I’ve got a workaround and have implemented it. You won’t notice any difference in the site but I’ve used a 301 redirect to point the home page to a different page (basically a duplicate) with a unique name. Hopefully this will fix the issue but it will take a few weeks to see if it does as it takes time for the site to get crawled and re-indexed. I may not need GlassOrchidZ.com after all.