Intro To Neon Art Class offered at The Museum of Neon Art in Glendale.

My Neon artwork takes inspiration from California mountain ranges and the moon. When designing it I was thinking about Ojai California and the “Pink Moment” sunset. I wanted to capture the feeling of being in the mountains with the moon hanging over head. The animated movement in the moon was an unexpected addition. When trying to find a transformer for my artwork, the piece started to animate and bead. One classmate of mine, Heather said she found it to be soothing and peaceful to look at and that was exactly what I was going for. I built this neon artwork during my Intro To Neon Art Class offered at The Museum of Neon Art in Glendale.

To design my piece I used Adobe Illustrator. I started with the pen tool and set my stroke to 8mm. Tip: manually type in mm and the stroke will automatically convert the Millimeter (mm) to point (pt). I chose 8mm to match the tubing size I was going to use.

Once done drawing my artwork I converted the strokes into shapes and then expanded shapes. Doing so makes it easier for the Neon bender to follow the form of the shapes of the design.

Next I set the object to reflect. It is important to reflect the artwork otherwise the artwork will appear backwards when it is hung up on a wall. It is especially important if the piece has any words in it.

Last I grouped the artwork, selected it and then offset the path by a few inches so that my artwork would have an outline for the cutout of the backing of my piece.

I decided to put a few inches off the artwork so that the glass would have a comfortable resting area so when the piece is in the process of being transported or mounted up on a wall, the glass would always be safe and far from the resting ground.

For my Neon Piece, I went with Salmon Rose 8mm glass tubes with an Argon gas. For the half circle, I went with an Uncoated Cobalt Blue glass tube with a Krypton gas. The smaller the tubing the brighter the gas. Krypton is a white gas and Argon is a light blue. Some people use Mercury to make it even brighter, I did not.

For my power supply, I turned to to Tech 22 for a Model 3, Bead-maker. For my neon backing, I used a black vinyl that has a reflected gloss to it that I got from our professor, David Otis Johnson of Leafcutter Studios. He also cut the piece of vinyl for me.

To mount the glass to the vinyl, I used copper wiring and glass neon tube supports, with a metal base and screws that I then spray painted with black gloss to match the vinyl.