Valley product makes glass art easier

PALMER — Lisa Lehrman-Bon and her family started out on the demand side of the art supply business.

“My husband is an artist, but more of a sculptor and a whalebone carver than anything else,” she said.

Lehrman-Bon and her family manufacture and ship specialized art clay from their home in the Trunk Road area under the business name Clay Mania Art Clay Inc. “Clay,” though, is probably too strong of a term. Technically, you have to call it a “firing medium.” That’s because once the stuff is put in a kiln and fired what comes out isn’t ceramic, it’s glass or metal — and not some facsimile of either of those things. It’s real, transparent glass or it’s real, 100 percent metal.

Lehrman-Bon and her family had a shop in the old Cottonwood Creek Mall called Bear and Raven. That, of course, was before the mall was torn down to make room for Target. They had some of their own art in there and some of it sold.

“We tried to make a living selling art, but we made a better living selling art material to artists,” Lehrman-Bon said.

Which, of course, is an old Alaska story, the most famous example of which comes from the Gold Rush era.

“The people that mined gold didn’t make nearly as much as the people that mined the miners,” Lehrman-Bon said.

That is, the miners mostly went broke, but outfitters and grocers made fortunes.

As for the products; Lehrman-Bon said there are two lines. There’s Glasclay and Metal Mania Metal Clay. They’re not the sort of things you can do at home in the oven. All need to have a digitally controlled kiln to work.

Firing traditional glass usually produces a puddle, but Glasclay isn’t traditional glass. It’s powdered glass mixed with a binder and water. What that binder is specifically is a secret Lehrman-Bon would rather keep to herself, but she said it is an organic material.

Artists can sculpt Glasclay just like one would sculpt modeling clay or Play-Doh.

“The binder burns out and it’s glass,” she said.

There are two types of Glasclay. The original is good for three-dimensional work. Lehrman-Bon said it allows people to get into glasswork who might not have before.

The other type is only good for “flat work,” like stained glass. That flat work clay, Lehrman-Bon said, has an advantage over cutting pieces from traditional panes of colored glass in that the process to use it is much less difficult.

“You can roll this stuff out as if you were doing cookies and cut out forms,” she said.

Her husband, Roger Lehrman-Bon, came up with the idea a couple of years ago when he started thinking about processes ancient Romans used. Within a year they had a working prototype and applied for a patent.

Now, they’ve signed up with distributors in Denver, Anchorage and Florida. The products are available online.

Later, they started looking at metal clays. Mitsubishi Corp. has a patent on clays made with gold and silver. It’s a process that is very useful in jewelry making. But Mitsubishi didn’t invent or patent clay for other types of metals.

That market, Lehrman-Bon said, is a little more crowded. Other companies offer copper and bronze clays, like she does. But she doesn’t think anybody else does brass clay.

“We have three metal clays and they’re starting to get pretty excited about them in different places,” Lehrman-Bon said.

The products are all manufactured, packaged and shipped from the Valley.

“It’s feast or famine,” Lehrman-Bon said when asked if the manufacturing business adds up to a full-time gig. It certainly keeps her busy. “There’s plenty of paperwork computer work and legwork to do in between the orders coming in.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.