IP Senior Thesis

The girl covered in green oil paint…

Nothing is safe.  My face, my hair, my neck, my clothes, and every inch of my hands.  Covered in green oil paint smudges.  Let me tell you what great looks you get working at a coffee shop and handing people coffee and baked goods and sandwiches with green tinted hands.  It always goes over real well.  Any cuts on my hands have bathed in mineral spirits far too often this past week and a half.  Currently my headphones, computer charger, and memory card reader all have tinges of green.  I can’t escape it!  I went to practice sew in the fuzz on a dry cactus piece today and some residual green got pulled into the fibers.  It’s madness.

And madness is the perfect way to describe these past couple of days.  The curse of being a visual artist and a recovering perfectionist hit me hard.  So oil paint was borderline risky to begin with.  It has a great rich color, but metal is not particularly porous.  What are my two options?  To prepare the metal by blasting it with an intense pressure hose of sand to give it a rough grit, or cover the piece in gesso as a primer.  There was no way my semi-fragile piece was going near the sandblaster, and primer would not only take away the texture I carefully hammered in, but also give it a flat painted look instead of letting some of the metal shine through.

So I darkened the metal, and went for it and hoped for the best.  I was told to wait a week to let it dry.  Small nightmare for a student approaching the impending show deadline.  But I started to work on my next piece.  I painted the first piece (from the last blog which was in fact my second piece that I was able to join while repairing the broken one).  A few days later I did some light touch up on the first one to be painted and finally having fixed the other broken piece, painted that one to match.  I walked away for a few days.  But something was off.  The first one to be painted was a flat matte color.  Brilliant emerald, but matte without a doubt and a little sparse.  The second one to be painted was a matching brilliant emerald but nice and shiny.  I thought maybe it needed to dry and kept waiting it out.  Nothing.  It was a slight difference but completely driving me mad.  Although I intent to seal it with a gloss coat anyways, I liked the second one better.  It looked more metallic.  If only I could have painted them at the same time…  

So today I tried to figure out the changing factor.  I added a hint of yellow the second time, maybe that was the shine.  I nervously decided to repaint the first piece, knowing I’ll have to let it sit a few more days.  I finished and dabbed off the paint with the shammy just like the first.  It was still pretty matte.  I plop it next to the other one and instantly realize they’re now two different shades.  Oh no, the people in the metals studio assure me.  It’s just wet, it’s just the light.  You’re just imagining it.  Oh no, one was yellow emerald and the other was now a bluish dark green… and matte.  I dug up old photos of the first one while it was wet (back when they matched)  No, it wasn’t this dark.  Maybe it was the layers of paint that were now too thick?  After leaving and coming back I decide this will haunt me, and crunch myself for time again by taking some sandpaper and steel wool to the whole thing to eat off some of the paint layers.  This time I add slightly more light green and yellow.  I frantically paint it on and buff it off.  Closer in color, but still darker.  I keep pushing more paint off.  Finally it looks much closer.  I’m green shade paranoid now, but feeling finally like I have achieved a nice match.

The one great success was adding white to the raised dots.  I wanted this detail that was lost when I painted the pieces green.  Mike the studio coordinator suggested thinning out acrylic paint and then drybrushing to hit the top raised pieces.  I tried this tentatively.  Definitely did not work by any stretch of the imagination.  Switched over to gesso which is thicker and would combat the green.  Brush strokes showing up on the non raised metal.  I would have to hand paint each one.  Finally an actual use for all the wooden toothpicks I bought.  I spent a few hours sitting there trying to locate each raised bump and try not to shake and get as close to the top as possible.  I’m thrilled with the effect.  It adds this wonderful organic and alive look and really helps bring out the contours and converging points.  The only downside is that it’s hard to tell the dots are actually raised metal instead of just a paint detail.  But I can happily get past that.  I did briefly try exposing the copper instead of white but it wasn’t as strong of an effect and would have been lost with the more brown ish wool fuzz.

I’m looking into fiber optics for my cactus spikes to not overwhelm the piece.  About to sacrifice a friend’s fiber option lamp to get the nice transparent plastic fibers.  We’ll see how that goes and if I’ll need to find another option or if that will be the winning material.

As for the next piece, I am working on an arm piece based off of little coccolithophores from the ocean that can only be examined under a microscope.  They having this great tiling of these pierced forms and I think it will make for a visually interesting piece with depth that I can wrap around the arm in clusters.  I knew the cutouts were going to be ridiculously time consuming so I looking into water jet cutting and laser cutting and quickly found this was not plausible for the small size I was working with.  I can’t make it out to be a quick process, it’s definitely not.  I sharpie the design, cut out the piece, file the edges, drill one hole for the circle and a good twenty-two holes on the outer edge for the cut outs.  I put a tiny sawblade in a hole, tighten it to the frame, cut away metal, loosen the blade, pull it out, put it in the next hole, re-attach and tighten the blade and cut again… twenty-some times.  Still, that’s metal, that’s how it goes, I love hand-crafting for a reason, so I’ve gotten about six basic cut-outs done.  I’ll be soldering a band in along with a texture piece to mimic the photograph and then I will ideally hammer the sides down slightly.  I imagine the pieces being riveted together and working almost like scales on the arm, but only covering a part of the forearm.  

And that’s my update.  Crazy nervous about how soon the show is coming up.  Hoping for a very productive few weeks.  

Spring Break Part 2 - Art studios all-day, everyday

Unfortunately my first day in the metals studio over break went horribly wrong. 

The risk working with metal is that you can easily undo weeks of work in an agonizingly short amount of time.  Tuesday, I asked Mike the metals studio coordinator how I might harden my copper shoulder piece whose pieces still were pretty easy to bend.  He suggested I use the tumbler which is steel shot (little beads) that you fill with some water and soap-like burnishing solution.  You then put it on a track and it slowly turns over and over and gets the piece all shiny.  The idea is that the small hitting pressure of the steel shot would harden up the piece.  But will it hurt my piece?  I asked.  It’s so fragile!  Oh no, I was assured, the tumbler is pretty gentle.

Forty minutes later, I go to remove the piece, and to my complete horror the entire piece is collapsed in on itself!  All of the hand formed, angled piece were now meeting each other, bent in, like some claw.  The forms were slightly misshapen too.  I tried to bend them back to their original angles.  As I was doing this, one of the six pieces popped off.  I was traumatized.  I knew it would be nearly impossible to solder this piece back on at an angle.  Still I tried, using heat shield to protect the other pieces.  The problem is this stops the piece from heating evenly so I wasn’t able to re-attach the piece.  I was trying to keep heating the piece in the hopes the solder would flow, and it did, and another piece fell off.  This was weeks of work, totally crumbling apart. 

I tried drilling holes and riveting the two fallen pieces back on, but now that the whole piece is angled to my shoulder shape, it’s impossible to hammer from both sides.  I tried to bend the tabs flat, but no matter what I did I couldn’t balance the piece.  I tried to fight off the panic by working on the second shoulder piece that wasn’t connected yet.  But I could only get four pieces to solder to the disc.  I’ve realized my joinery is flawed, so I decided to add a disc to the back of the pieces to double stabilize the tabs that are only joining at a fragile side seam.  This did finally work for the second piece which is stably attached and bent pretty well.

I tried the disc method on the other piece.  Now I have the framework, but three detached pieces still that I have to keep fighting with.  Hopefully the double discs will provide enough tension to hold the pieces (petals) in place while torching the whole thing.

To try to calm myself and ignore this fiasco, I started to work on felting.  I wet felted fibers to create a good 90 tiny little balls that I would use to create the fuzz around the cactus spikes.  There are 7 holes per each form and 12 forms total for a grand total of 84 balls I would need.  Once those were all rolled and dried, I took strips of wool fibers and used the needle to punch them into these strips.  This way I can probably sew them into the holes and avoid all the excess felt inside the forms.  Hopefully I can also figure out a better way to attach the spikes to these strips.

Then came the time to experiment with color.  A visiting steel artist last week mentioned something about dying the metal with a combination of oil paint mixed with finishing wax.  I took the one stable, angled shoulder piece and first darkened it.  Then I tried the oil paint and wax method.  That was a total failure.  Then I decided to just paint on the oil paint.

The effect is pretty huge.  It’s super intense right now and I’m a little freaked out.  I think it’ll go nicely with the brownish wool and clear spikes (if I can ever figure that situation out).  Once it dries, I might take a little steel wool and try to buff some of it off so it’s not quite so intense, and a little more distressed.  But, on the other hand, it may be too much.  I did like the darkened metal and I could try to use colored wool or colored spikes instead against the dark copper metal.

I’m torn because I feel part of my attraction to the darkened metal may be because I have used it in other projects in the past and I know I like the effect.  But then a lot of people have liked this deep emerald color.  I just don’t want to lose the metallic look so that you have a decent sense of the material.  I can hear my metals prof in my head asking me how representational I want to get, and that’s something I’m still very unsure about.  I wanted it to look like tinted metal, and I certainly got that effect but I’m still not quite at peace with it.

And I have a nagging little feeling that the opinions I’ll get in small group critiques will only encourage my indecisiveness and self-doubt.  So here’s to hoping this all comes together soon, and that I can re-attach those poor fallen pieces.

I got a lot done, but I really wish my piece hadn’t fallen apart, I needed to get farther on my project this week.

Spring Break at the Botanical Gardens

No long post here.  My weekend home included a trip to the Botanical Gardens in Grand Rapids, MI.  I’ve visited this place many times but this time I was noticing things in a whole different way.  They had a ridiculous variety of cactus plants and I even got two little cactus-esque plants from the giftshop for my studio (I now realize this was probably misguided during the winter in a studio that gets no natural light).

Still, it was warm air while I was fighting of this miserable cold and a chance to get re-inspired (hopefully) and try to shake off the bad luck of the past week with IP.

Side Note: the first image is this metals artist who made the floor in the entryway.  There are probably 100 cast metal pieces that are cross-sections of seeds and things under a microscope that are all about a quater-inch thick and then set into this stone floor.  I loved it because it reminded me of the radiolaria type things I was looking at.

New Techniques, New Problems….

So, by now you probably have a decent sense of these cactus shoulder pieces I am creating.  The main form I hand-formed out of copper, but I wanted to somehow create my own spikes and also use felt to create the fuzz around the cactus spines.  

For the fuzz, the technique I wanted to learn was needle felting.  I went to Nancy, the fibers studio coordinator who kindly lent me a needle and offered up lots of colored wool fibers.  I initially chose a flesh toned wool but have since changed my mind to some more earthy tones.  Needle felting, to my current limited understanding, takes this needle with notches all along the sides and by stabbing into some little woolen fiber form (usually on top of a foam chunk) you slowly start to knot the fibers together and it retains a certain shape.  

I had to drill holes through my cactus formed shapes to let the fuzz and spikes come through.  For felting I started by pulling fibers through and then felting a ball on top.  This made for really huge puffs I wasn’t totally thrilled with and a ton of felt on the inside that would need to be sewn into something and trimmed.  Not exactly what I was thinking…

I set that aside for a bit and focused on my spikes which I was casting from toothpicks.  I bought some wooden toothpicks and searched for a thin container before giving up and cutting my own in the woodshop from some thin acrylic that I glued together leaving one detachable panel.  I then used rubber cement to glue each toothpick onto the removable panel.  Next I would need to mix together the blue silicone mold solution.  I had never done this before and would have to weigh out the solution in a 10 to 100 ratio (oh yes, that’s right off the container… why not just say 1 to 10?).  This was all done on an archaic scale where you push those little weighted metal bars into numbered notches.  It looked straight out of my gradeschool science class.  Since the container didn’t say anything about wearing gloves I made the mistake of using my bare hands and scooping with a cup.  The white goop is terribly thick and sticky and messy and gets everywhere.  The blue dye curing agent has to be totally mixed in and I was trying to use a thin tapered water cup.  So my first attempt led to a mold that didn’t set all the way through.  Oddly enough, the silicone rubber dried around the toothpicks so I popped those out and figure I would use it as a practice mold.  It was still a huge frustration because you have to wait 24 hours for it to set.  

So that was a Monday, Tues. I found out it didn’t work.  Wednesday I made mold number two being meticulous about mixing the solution completely.  I also poured resin for practice spikes.  I only had a broken purple chalk pastel to use to practice dye a few spikes.  The problem here was shoving the resin in since I was leaving the spikes flat to try to get two points from every mold (I think if it were tipped up gravity might have shoved the resin better into the points.  Also, resin shrinks down when drying so to have them fully formed, I had to let resin spill off to the sides that would later mean breaking this excess off and lots of filing.

Thursday morning, extremely sleep deprived and stressed, I came in to find mold number two did not fare well over the night.  The removable panel apparently did not stay in place with my questionable taping job and the silicone had set mid spill.  Mold number two ruined.  Another 24 hours wasted.  

Later I went to pop out the practice spikes and that was another huge letdown.  Most were broken due to the fragile nature of resin or air bubbles that had formed.  Not a single spike actually came to a point.  I wish I could tell you why but I have no clue.  I filed one clear and one purple down to points and they looked pretty nice, but it would be a huge effort to do all the spikes this way, although I love the translucency and control over color.  

Then, I put them up to the formed shoulder piece.  They didn’t look right at all.  I can pull them down to whatever height, but they are just too visually thick.  In the photograph, multiple spikes come out of each fuzz point, and this would only allow one.  I also don’t know how to attach it to the fuzz.

I’ve tried to find clear toothpicks, I’ve looked at everything from flossing picks, to restaurant supply websites and I’m considering caving and using wire, although I desperately want the spikes to stay translucent.

At this point I was sick with some flu and incredibly frustrated.  I did manage to come up with a good next idea for a jewelry piece, but figured I should go home for the weekend to get over being sick and reset before spending spring break in the studios. 

And now, for a brief interruption…

I feel the need to post my most recent project for my metals class (Body Transformations)

After having research many cultures and countries and their styles of adornment, we were tasked with addressing one of two issues: Society’s perception or what’s beautiful (and refusing or conforming to these ideals) or creating a piece on our identity.  I wasn’t exactly feeling particularly conceptual and my thoughts are consumed with nature and IP at this point so I decided to do a sort of mesh of the two prompts.  If I was talking about identity, I’m super intrigued by natural design and geometry and pattern and color, you name it.  It’s something that’s been a huge interest of mine for years and changed and developed, especially recently after working at an organic farm this past summer.   Then it also sort of deals with what I consider beautiful which is the cross between function and form and my current examining of wearing nature on the body.  As far as form, I was really taken with an image during Anne’s body adornment presentations.  It was an old style cloak pin called a fibula and it was a decorative way to wrap and attach/pin together a cloak.  The one she showed us was two upside-down triangles with some interesting circular ring above and a sharp triangular pin I couldn’t quite figure out.  Chains hung between the two pins much like a necklace.

I started to make the triangles and had to score metal and fold it to create the side of the small container I was making.  As soon as I created a smaller triangle to fit the inside and make little chambers, I couldn’t help but laugh.  No wonder I was drawn to this form, this was exactly the formation of my first project last semester in smart surfaces, that our group all loved with the folding triangular pyramids that would create a shade structure.  It also was the start of Sierpinski’s triangle which I was totally fascinated by in high school geometry (how did I end up back at my IP thesis?).

All that aside, I closed of the central chamber and wanted to leave the three side chambers open for natural elements.  I could be a sort of elemental type project (earth, land, water) not to be cliché…  I created an etching from a plant I had found last semester for Smart Surfaces when we were looking at natural tesselations.

I took the image Photoshop and cropped it down to the pattern alone.  Then I dragged it  into Illustrator and converted it to a live trace and adjusted it so it was black and white.  I repeated the image and then printed it.  You can then photocopy it onto a blue transfer paper (shown in the images above) and heat it onto the metal.  You peel that off and you get a laydown of color which usually is pretty spotted but has the general detail down.  Then I take this tar-like substance and paint it on to fix any areas that show through.  Heat that and let it dry and then pop it into an acid bath for a few hours, and it comes out etched.  

I originally wanted the etched faces to cover the natural elements I was inlaying and these faces would hinge and open outward, but then I didn’t really know how to successfully attach these hinges and I thought it would look pretty strange to have all this hardware on the front.  So then I considered tension-setting the pieces to create little lids.  This was a huge disaster that ate up a lot of time.  Finally I realized that perhaps I wanted this piece to be worn and showing the natural elements instead of having to open them to reveal them.  I cut out windows in the etched triangular panels and really liked how that showed off the etching better.  I soldered these windows on, cut out circles and sharp triangular points and attached those via soldering.  I carefully soldered on two medium sizes rings to the base to hold the chain pieces I was attaching, and finally had the general form.  

I then went and bought real moss and stones and sadly fake flowers because anything real would likely still die and shrivel even with epoxy resin.  Epoxy resin burns with heat and is super toxic so it ALWAYS has to be the very last step.  I chemically darkened the copper and sanded it a little lighter, and then filled the side chambers with epoxy resin, and filled each one respectively with moss, stones, and flowers.  I love the moss, if you look up close it has these great little areas that branch off like little trees.

I also used filed piano wire to create pin backs so that the piece could function as it was mean to - as a cloak pin.  

If you want to check out the piece in person, it’s outside of slusser gallery in the glass cases.  I’m torn because originally I wasn’t planning this piece for my IP show, but now I feel like it actually might fit into the series.  Susan disagreed because it’s not as sculptural and using the body as my other pieces (which may be true).  I’ll have to think about that.  I still may want to incorporate it somehow.  

Fish, Frustration, and Postcard madness

So my pieces were finally formed and textured, and I had zero idea of how to attach them.  My metals prof originally suggested that I cut them out leaving a sizable tab so that I could rivet them together.  For anyone non-metals, riveting is basically drilling a hole, putting a piece of wire into that hole and then hammering both sides out so that it’s essentially stuck in place. 

After actually cutting out the pieces, which ironically now look like fish, I soon realized how riveting these pieces was not going to work.  This would require me to rivet through a huge stack of six layers of 20 gauge metal.  Also, each piece would have to stay slightly higher and they would be in a small spiral upward instead of flat on the same level.  My next theory was that I could keep the tabs and solder each piece onto a small circular metal ring that would hold the pieces in place and allow me to bend them after.  Anne Mondro quickly discouraged me from this attempt.  The ring would allow for very minimal contact surface and would not be sturdy at all.  She suggested I solder them to the back of a disc.  In short, I would cover a disc in solder, then flux it, drop in on top of all six pieces and heat it and hope they all had enough contact surface to attach and create a seal.  As soldering tends to go, it can be a huge struggle/fight and this was no exception.  After my first failed attempt, I was horrified to find that the metal had softened so much that sanding the pieces before trying again actually started to bend the shapes I had spent hours forming.  

After some further fighting, I finally attached one entire piece.  Luckily, the softened metal let me bend the piece to my shoulder fairly easily.  

Around this time, there came the impending due date (moved up a whole week) of our postcard submission.  This was a pretty huge deal for me.  I feel like the postcard embodies your entire project.  I still have postcards from the previous seniors in metals that I took classes with.  You send it out as an invite to people you know, it goes out to the people that donate to the art school.  Conveniently, I don’t have a finished piece, and I didn’t really want to fake it and have the piece in the show look entirely different.  I discussed this with John Marshall a few times.  He talked about making it more about the process as opposed to the piece.  What did I want to remember this year by?  All the time I spent hand-forming and tooling these pieces in the metals studio?  The process and craft of metalsmithing that was so time intensive and perhaps lost when you see the finished piece in the gallery?

I easily jumped on board with this idea… until I tried to photograph my piece.  I arranged the fish-like cut out pieces into the full formation, I left the other six to expose the inside texture.  I added my mold and the scrap metal left over from cutting out the pieces.  I threw in the dapping tools I used to create the forms, and bought some nice colored paper to photograph it on.  I hated it.  It looked staged, like I had just thrown a whole bunch of things into a random composition.  I didn’t want this to be my postcard.  Sure enough the 5pm deadline loomed.  I started to look through anything IP related in desperation.  Maybe I could use the inspiration image of the cactus I took from the botanical gardens!  But I didn’t want it to be just about that piece since I sure hope I’ll have other pieces in my show.  But then I realized that there were some really great images of plants that completely fascinated me.  Afterall, the whole goal of my IP project is to encourage this observation of unique plant structures and to foster a familiarity and interaction with the human form.  Why not put a picture of a strange plant on the front?  I was proud of the images I had taken that day.  I dug back up a quotation from a jewelry book I had from the library that spoke to me, and called it a day.

Success?  Not exactly.  I soon got the lovely email I was one of the 35 students who had somehow failed this postcard test and ignored the rules or directions or saved the image incorrectly (sorry, John).  I cleverly renamed and moved my image over to the external drive AFTER placing it on the InDesign file, although I should well know from illustrator that moving or renaming an image messes up the link.  I blame temporary insanity from a crazy week.  But here was a new lease on my postcard image I was still indecisive over.  So I decided instead to make a postcard with three cross-sections of photographs I had taken from the botanical gardens.  This way I could re-incorporate a cactus image and still have two crazy looking plants.  After a few emails back and forth with Rodemer, all was fixed and I have a postcard I’m happy with.  I think…

The quote on the back reads: “I think about the body as a site and how intimate jewelry can be by virtue of that site.  Jewelry exists on a comforting human scale, not as some ponderous, self-regarding sculpture.  It soothes, questions, or provokes without bombast or affectation.” -Keith A. Lewis

I particularly like this.  I feel for me it helps explain the idea of moving towards using the body curvatures with my jewelry and exploring the familiarity we have with a jewelry piece we wear and how wearing something inspired from the natural and organic could create this interesting relationship on an approachable scale. 

I hope that makes sense, I say something along those lines much more eloquently in my thesis.  

Neglected Blog Part 2

So, per usual.  I mean to blog, I take tons of process photos and then get wrapped up in all the actual stuff I have to do.  But here I am finally on a rainy Saturday ready to catch up on explaining my process as we enter the final month or so crunch towards IP due dates.  

So.  Part one of the many posts I will start today goes way back to my forming process, which was a time intensive process to say the least.  Each big shoulder piece has 6 hand formed curved pieces.  That left me with the task of hammering out 12 individual hammer-stretched copper pieces.  This was an entirely new process I had learned so the first and second were learning experiences.  After that I got the process down to about three hours for every set of two.  The process went a little something like this:

Cut out the metal.  Sand it down to an even finish with four grits of sandpaper.  Drill holes to match the mold.  Heat the copper to soften the metal.  Once that happens you plunge it into water to cool it down and then put it in an acid bath to clean it back off.  Out it comes and goes into the baking soda and water and then you take a brush of brass bristles and scrub the crystalized film back off.  Then I screw in the metal and start to hammer the flat sheet into my masonite mold.  It quickly re-hardens because of the hammering and I have to reheat the metal, put it in water, chemicals, rinse scrub, re-screw the whole sheet back in, hammer deeper, then the metal hardens.  In total I would say the whole hammering, re-heating process happens about six times or so before I have the general form with the ridge.  

Once all six were cut out, I went crazy trying to decide if I should add texture like my reference photograph of the cactus.  Once I started to add texture, there was no going back.  I would be doing all of the pieces that way, or I would have to completely re-from two pieces.  I used a little tool with a pointed end and marked the forms with sharpie on the inside and then went to town randomly hammering in the texture.  Hammering from the back allowed me to have a texture that was raised on the outside.  Staying up crazy late at night had me suddenly looking at all of my pieces and thinking, what on earth have I done?

But, as art generally goes, a little sleep and time away had me feeling confident that this process helped add a nice organic texture and visual look where the lines converged.  That process took a good 45 minutes for every set of 2 forms.  So, more or less another 6 hours just to add texture.  

Next came another terrifying hurdle, cutting the pieces out.

And so it all begins…

So to recap, after learning about the non-conforming die technique (see post below) I was starting to think that this would be the way to go to create the curved ridge of the cactus sides.  Briefly I instead considered doing a similar technique but with our hydraulic press.  You still have the same masonite mold, but a machine pushing the metal.  It would be somewhat faster, and would be precise, but the forms wouldn’t be as deep of indentations and it would create a form that was entirely symmetrical and perfectly rounded.  That’s not what I was looking form.  Slow stretching and hammering down of the metal allows for more volume and an organic look and I would be able to push the center out more in both directions and create a nice solid ridge.

So I decided to use the non-conforming die, hand tooling technique I had just learned.  Since so much material is wasted, I decided to take a risk, and put two forms side by side and hope that hammering wouldn’t throw the one next to it off.  I put in bolts between to try to help stabilize the moving metal.  This way too I figured I would be able to visually gauge how consistent the two were in relation to each other.  It certainly was harder.  I had to re-heat the metal fairly often to keep it soft and moving and I went over it again and again.  But finally I created a volume and ridge I was completely thrilled with.  Another student in my section said they look like reptile backs or reminiscent of some sort of spine.  I kind of like that idea and it just makes me feel better about choosing this technique.  

I started working on the second set of this mold.  As far as my sketch goes, I would need six for each shoulder piece (and more if I choose to do two smaller ones as well).  That means I’ll be hand tooling this mold six times.  So far I have one and a half.  So basically I will be a staple in the metals studio.

Unfortunately my studio times are during classes in the metals studio.  Metals for non-majors in the morning with Russell Thayer has not been too problematic.  The students are making all kinds of noise and alternating rooms so it’s easy to slip in and do my work.  But the steel class in the afternoon with Michael Flynn has proved more problematic.  They will be listening to demonstrations and I know me being in there is disruptive.  But I’m really stuck.  Hammering in the IP studios non-stop would drive my section crazy and I really need the use of the torches which requires the loud fume hood to be on.  So, I’m a little nervous about that.  I need to use my studio times to get work done and I can’t change them around because of my work and class schedule.  Time to get Michael Flynn on my side…

As far as the spikes for the cactus go.  We created little copper tubes as samples for metals.  While I briefly thought this might work, it is too time intensive for creating a whole bunch at once and I don’t think I could create anything thin enough to represent a cactus spike.  Then my prof Anne Mondro suggested that I could cast a toothpick (altered of course) in the blue silicone mold we use for casting.  I could then cast them in resin.  I really like this idea because it wouldn’t take a huge amount of copper, I could add color to the spikes which could be a really cool effect, I can create a lot at once and not worry if they break or come out strange, and I kind of like the contrast.  The soften cactus skin and volume is being created in hard copper, and the tough spikes are in a hard medium that will have a certain fragility. 

So.  I’m thrilled to be moving forward, but as usual stressing out about how little time in the semester is left.

Also I’m struggling with deciding how to color this thing.  Bright enamels in cactus colors?  Use a different non-related color palate?  Patina?  Colored pencil?  Oil paint?  I definitely need to create some samples to help me decide and I might pose this question in small crits on Monday.  We’ll see.

Non-Conforming Die Technique

So, every semester in metals, Anne Mondro gives us harder samples to learn how to do.  It’s a great way to learn a new technique and keep everyone in the class engaged at whatever level they are at.  The three of us who are “fourth semesters” were tasked with creating a non-conforming die, chasing and repousse-ing the form, and creating a metal tube called a spiculum.  

The non-conforming die is created by sandwiching some sort of basic soft wood in between two layers of masonite, which is harder and will retain its shape when hard metal is being hammered like crazy into it.  You glue it all together, clamp it and let it dry, and then you cut out the shape you want.  We did this by drilling holes on the perimeter of our shapes, cutting between these lines with a jewelers saw and then sanding it all down until the shape was smooth and even up and down.  

Since the hammering moves and stretches the metal, the sheet of copper has to be thick (at least 20 gauge to not hammer right through it) and screwed into the masonite mold.  So we drilled holes, heated the metal to keep it soft, and traced the form on the side we would be hitting as a guide.

Then you begin to use little tools called dapping tools.  They are balls in varying sizes attached to a post.  You take the ball and put it onto the metal and start hammering along the edge to create an indentation.  You have to keep removing the metal and heating it with the torch as hammering hardens the form.  You slowly even out the ridges, and then if you want, this technique allows for irregular pushing out of the form.  Using bigger dapping punches, and spending more time on a given area, you can stretch the metal pretty far.  I created one of each.  One half was flat on the bottom to rest against the body, and the other was pushed out with the bottom part having the most volume.  

Then when deciding what to push into the form, I thought of the things I had been looking at for IP since that’s what’s on my mind most of the time.  I did a variation on the tropical lobster plant that has braided-like alternating parts.  To do this in metal, you fill the form with a tar-like substance called pitch and let it harden.  Then you can hammer in lines with small flat chasing tools on the front of the form.  Once the lines are deep enough, you melt the pitch back out, heat and clean the metal, and then you put it back in the masonite mold and can use tiny ball tools to hammer out volumes in-between the lines from the backside.  I was actually incredibly happy with the effect of this process.  

So what does this all mean for IP?   Well when planning the cactus piece, I was very confused about how to create the metal volumes I needed.  It turns out this non-conforming die process would give me the ideal way to create my organic volumes.  So this technique came at the perfect time and allowed me to get a sort of prototype practice in before jumping in to creating the actual piece for the show.  

Cactus Love

So I apparently neglected my blog for a good two weeks.  That was entirely un-intentional.  Just lots of work being done.  Which is a nice change.  I feel like I have forward motion again.

But when things started back up and I found myself stuck, I started to combine what we’re doing in metals with ideas for IP.  Our prof, Anne Mondro has been giving presentations on body adornment in history in various cultures and countries.  I’ve been taking some good notes and it helped envision things in a bigger scale and incorporating multiple elements of the body.  Still, the focus I want in my project is really incorporating the curvature of the body.  This is really breaking away from my usual designs of geometric little pendants that just rest on a chain and sit on the body.

So.  It was time to bring the figure into my work.  Time to pull out the “Fashion Poses” illustration book I bought back when I briefly envisioned myself in a fashion design career.  It helped me to get some interesting poses quickly on the page and to think about how to adorn body parts like the elbow, the shoulder, the calf and ankle.  They look a little silly, but still it was incredibly helpful.  

Faced with daunting decisions of how to choose a theme, I just sort of took a break and decided to instead go back to early sketches from this semester.  I wanted to look at what I was initially drawn to because I know I was super intrigued and invested in those things.  Scanning through sketches and pictures of Puerto Rico and my trip to the botanical gardens, I stumbled upon my cactus sketch.  There was this really great photo I took of a pretty thick cactus and I loved the look and texture.  When I first thought of translating it into a piece I sketched a silly cross section type piece that would work as a pendant or bracelet.  I appropriately became frustrated because I hadn’t really thought of a way to put it on the body and abstract it instead of just copy it.

But this time around it clicked more.  I started drawing a more dimensional representation of the cactus.  I first was drawn to sketching this cactus piece on the elbow (probably because using the elbow was suggested by Russell Thayer during my faculty review).  While I initially liked this, I then found myself struggling with how to attach it.  Having a chain or ribbon would look incredibly jarring and out of place.  I sketched a few smaller cactus tops and it looked cluttered.  It also hit me that the piece would likely require the elbow to stay bent and that really isn’t plausible for a wearable piece.  It’s not that I don’t want to push the envelope of jewelry - I do.  But I want it the pieces to be something crazy that still can semi-feasibly be worn.  Side Note: believe my irritation when working at the coffee shop and showing my engineering co-worker my blog excitedly with all my favorite design references.  Her response: “I thought you were making real jewelry!  Not crazy stuff like that!”  How lovely.  Yep, that’s what you get with us crazy art students.  My pieces may have been smaller and more pendant-like, but I’ve never really made any jewelry piece that fits your typical commercial style.  I actually very much dislike fine metal jewelry.  Give me something in a crazy colors and patterns any day.  

Anyways, I digress.  Elbow didn’t seem to be the way to go.  I quickly sketched neck and shoulders at the bottom of my page when it hit me that I could use the shoulders!  This idea really intrigued me and led to more sketching that had me really exciting about the possibilities and how I would photograph this piece and how incredibly cool it could look.  I like the idea of protection of something semi-delicate (be it the cactus filled with water or the soft neck and shoulder area).  It also sort of works as an armor and deterrent while still working as a visually compelling piece.  The shoulder and collarbone area on a woman I think is seen as graceful and beautiful and I like adding something hard and prickly that would extend the body.

I also started to research cacti and their spikes/spines and found a fantastic photo of the “fuzz” around each spike cluster.  I never thought of a cactus as a specialized stem and the spikes as leaves.  Anyways, the zoomed in photo made me think of needle-felted balls.  This seemed like a perfect way to incorporate fabric/fibers into my work.  The material for the spikes still eludes me, though.

Now I find myself faced with figuring out how to actually construct this piece.  Excited to have something to work on, but stressing about how little time we have left in the semester.