Stuck in the mud of tradition
I am really excited about my opportunity to teach using webinars. I have always wanted to retire into teaching and this will allow me to pass on my technologies to many more people than doing normal classes in a school setting. I have found that the educational system is stuck in the mud of tradition. Every year they apply for their budgets to keep teaching the same old skills and if their is any money left over it is given to electronic imagery. After studying for five years and becoming quite skilled in classic mediums I realized I was not going to make much of a living pushing oil around a canvass or carving some natural material into some artistic shape. I looked around and saw that the world around me was made of glass and plastics so that is what I focused on as my medium. I quickly found an abundant material that had no way to be reclaimed in the form of tempered glass. Once it is cut to shape and tempered it can not be cut again. I started to make deals with factories to trade finished pieces like board room tables for truck loads of their waste glass. This gave me a limitless supply of expensive new tempered glass to experiment with for the last forty years. To date I have made thousands of pieces and developed many ways to up-cycle this amazing material with out the use of heat or large machines. Ounce someone learns these skills they can start to earn a living in a spare bedroom or garage with very little start up costs. The glass is available for free or very cheap from any glass vendor or building demolition company. The resins and paints are available from any hardware store and the cutting and etching tools cost very little and seem to last forever. I have had many large shipments of tempered glass but none as big as the last one I received last year. One mistake on one project produced 2800 sheets of quarter inch clear tempered glass 68''x 38''. I took 300 of them and the rest were used as road crush, by turning it into gravel the companies call it recycling but I think that is a terrible waste of a material that took a lot of energy to produce and has the potential to be up-cycled into many new products. Over the next few years I am looking forward to teaching these skills to people who need to create their own opportunity to earn a living without having to go into dept for an expensive education that may never pay for itself. Their is nothing that I do that I couldn't teach in a few hours to anyone that wants to learn it.