Portland-based artist Eric Franklin creates breathtaking Luminous Skull Sculptures, by using glass tubes that contain ionized gasses. All this creations are handmade using borosilicate glass. The process of creating these distinctive skull sculptures is tedious, as the structure of the human skull is deviously complex. Moreover, these are not made of solid glass pieces, each skull is made from a network of glass tubes that have to be perfectly sealed to create the vacuum necessary to fill them up with neon and light them. One of the challenges when creating the luminous skull is that fact that when these are lighted-up the glass gets hot. Therefore, one cannot use plain glass to construct them, it is of paramount importance to use heat resistant borosilicate glass. A type of glass that has a much lower coefficient of expansion than the glass used to make vases and such is much harder to work with. In addition the glass thickness has to be pretty consistent as well to avoid cracking. The artist spends about 1000 hours on each piece and in the course of his creative process the teeth are his biggest challenge. While these peculiar skull sculptures are macabre and loaded with...