THE ARTS DISTRICT, Calif. -- Artist Lili Lakich has been in her warehouse studio space for nearly 40 years, back before this area was called the Arts District. Now, she’s busy building neon art sculptures for collectors and companies and teaches a neon workshop several times a year.

“This is my signature work, 'Mona,' which is based on Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa,” said Lakich. “I took a detail of that, highlighted it with neon tubes as a way of saying that neon can be fine art as well.”

As a young art student, Lakich asked a local sign company if they would teach her how to work with neon. They said no, but a worker gave her a neon tube in the shape of a white heart and instructed her how to wire it so she went and picked up a transformer.

“I was in art school in New York and I hated painting,” says Lakich. “I hated printmaking, I hated everything that they were teaching except drawing. I love drawing and when I found out that neon was drawing with light, I decided that I was going to pursue that.”

Before starting any neon project, it always begins with a drawing. An intricate art form that incorporates glass bending, wires, transformers and gases, neon art gets designed on paper first.

“This is the face pattern that we make prior to bending a neon design,” said Lakich. “It is all the neon tubes laid out. Once this was done, we reverse it and draw it all over again and it's the tube bending pattern.”

On the first day of Lakich's workshop, glass bender Brian Currie demonstrates how to make letters out of tubes. And though it looks dangerous, everyone already has ideas on what they want to make.  

“I’m not sure entirely what I want to make yet, but my first idea was to make like a halo and then like devil horns,” said art student Sydney Richardson.

“You think you’re breathing oxygen, but you’re actually breathing all of the gases. You’re breathing neon, which is the bright orange,” said Lakich.

And when you consider the fact that neon's color is derived from noble gases that occur in the atmosphere, you might just say that neon is the art of the heavens.