After the success last year, we set aside a few weekends to build stained glass pieces for this year's Desert Bus for Hope (more extensive work-in-progress photos in the imgur gallery here). After much debate, we settled on designs based on our favorite pieces of art from War of the Spark, the Magic: The Gathering expansion released in May of this year. I chose Ugin, the Ineffable and Ouliana chose Liliana, Dreadhorde General - both using the alternative art that was available in Japanese language packs. I should note for the interested, both these pieces were sold by auction earlier this month as part of Desert Bus 2019. Together they raised a combined $9,572 for the charity Child's Play!
Just like last year, the vast majority of the credit for actually planning and executing the pieces goes to my partner. Still, I was glad to help out a bit with cutting, grinding, and such. The pieces turned out amazingly well, but were both much more intense undertakings that the previous year's piece, with many more individual pieces of glass, in stranger shapes (possible thanks to our newly acquired diamond saw), as well as tons of hand-painted details.
One thing we hadn't considered when planning the pieces was how they would be shipped. For previous projects we'd used the fancy reinforced art boxes offered by FedEx, but learned that they'd recently been discontinued. We were able to get one back-stocked one to use for Liliana, but Ugin was simply too large. This necessitated another side project: Building a crate fit for a spirit dragon! We settled on a rigid wooden outer case with a sandwich of styrofoam and egg-crate foam inside, isolated from the edges with bubble wrap. By necessity it had to come together in just a few days, and given that limitation it came out quite well!
Next year, if we keep up the tradition of building pieces for Desert Bus, we'll start from the available crate size and work our way backwards!