The Art of Beadmaking has several goals:

• Provide fair payment to the editors, authors, and designers involved in each project.

• Provide quality publications that will educate as well as inspire our community.

• Provide alternate sources of income for professional artists.

• Support families and artists by maintaining a work environment that is responsive to the needs of families and parents.

ABOUT ::: Brad Pearson
Owner/Author

Anyone who has ever watched Brad create one of his many exquisitely intricate glass beads over the torch would suspect that he was born with a glass rod in his hand. His masterful control of heat and fluid manipulation of glass seems deceptively easy. Since Brad has been working with hot glass since 1991, once owning a glass blowing studio and experienced as a scientific glass blower, beadmaking became a natural progression for his interest in glass.

Brad sees beads "as a template" that allows him to "explore texture, pattern, and color within a framework that is limitless." His current work "draws inspiration from many diverse cultures such as Tibetan prayer wheels, ancient writing and Celtic designs," to name a few. As Brad points out, "in most parts of the world, beads hold a great spiritual and cultural significance. I have tried to hold the viewer’s attention on a very small object by instilling some of this spirituality and mystery into my work. I view each piece as a miniature sculpture that retains its core function as a bead."

Website:  www.bradpearsonglass.com

ABOUT ::: Lori Greenberg
Author

Lori Greenberg, author of Hot Off the Press! is a glass bead and jewelry designer living in Cave Creek, Arizona. With an undergraduate degree in fine art and a master’s in counseling she has used her analytical and problem solving skills in many mediums including textile, dyes, wood, paint, clay and glass.

From the earliest stage of her lampworking career she has demonstrated a unique voice and style. When other bead makers tended to focus on surface decoration, she began expressing her unique style with uncommon shapes as well as organic, multi-layered patterns of decoration. While pursuing these unique shapes and designs with unconventional tools such as tongs and hollow tubing, the table top press tools emerged on the market. These innovations rocketed Lori forward in the development of her now recognizable style and led her to develop and refine new press tool techniques. Through several tutorials and published articles, Lori is recognized as a leader and innovator in the use of press tools.

While still intrigued with the multitude of shapes provided by the press tools, Lori uses them primarily as a starting point for her designs and continues to push the boundaries of bead design with new surface decoration techniques and creative sculpting of additional components.

You can see additional techniques in tutorials Lori has written for Lapidary Journal’s Step by Step
Beads or at her web site www.lorigreenberg.com.