Acrylic

I seem to get more and more obsessed with chopping acrylic/ Perspex sheet as time goes on.

 A foray into the world of acrylic plastic during high school and then college sparked my interest, I was fascinated by how  malleable the material was when heated and how, as with forging metal, it could be heated so far then be ruined by burning. The really big thing for me is fluorescent acrylic sheet, it glows under UV light and I'm fascinated by its ability to refract light within itself which in turn causes the edges to appear to be glowing.

The above image is a piece I made while exploring the material in college. I found I could exploit the glowing edges and create something that had shapes accentuated by light throughout. This is something I'm itching to combine with forged metal, not only the glowing edges but also just the bold colours of the acrylic itself.

The above image was taken with no flash using a UV black-light as the light source, it's hard to take an image like this without the proper photography equipment hence the blurriness though you get a good sense of the fluorescence. This was my first attempt at combining forged steel and perspex I think the outcome is great though the process gave me a feel for how much hassle it is to combine the two materials using different methods.