A Day of Demos...

The MetalClay Artisan Guild in Connecticut kicked off the month with our Annual Fall Show and Sale.  The Friday night reception was a great time, but what was really exciting was filling Saturday with demos for all levels of artists.  From a basic introduction to metal clay techniques to more advanced processes, there really was something for anyone interested or even just passing by.  I shared my organic pasting techniques, from selection of organic materials to preparing metal clay slip to layering and drying techniques.  Lis-el Crowley (lower left image) demonstrated how the new art clay formula lends itself to working with delicate coils and Alexis Crowley (right image) demonstrated how traditional carving techniques for printmaking can be applied to create texture plates for working with metal clay.  The day also included demos in working with base metals, carving in metal clay, working with textures and getting started in metal clay.  A special thanks to Susan Dunne for including us in her Art Smart Blog that week which helped us reach a broader audience for this show!

Annual Guild Show

This week in the studio has been a bit of a frenzy getting ready for our Metal Clay Artisan Guild in Connecticut's Annual Show and Sale.  If you find yourself in CT next weekend, come out and join us!  Friday evening will kick with a reception to meet the artists and Saturday will bring hourly technical demonstrations for those who are interested in learning more about metal clay.  My ring featured on the front of the show card will be part of the guild display and we will all have collections of work for sale. Its a great time to meet local artists, learn more about metal clay and get started on your holiday shopping.

Demonstrations:

10:30am - Creating Textures directly in Metal Clay

11:30am - Carving Metal Clay Forms

12:30pm - Using Two-Part Molds with Metal Clay

  1:30pm - Working with Mixed Metals in Metal Clay

  2:30pm - Working with Metal Clay Coils

  3:30pm - Working with Metal Clay in Paste Form

  4:30pm - Carving Texture Plates for use with Metal Clay

Don't Forget!  Bring a non-perishable food donation to receive a raffle ticket for door prizes created by the participating artists. 

Repairs in (fired) Metal Clay

"The best laid plans..." don't mean a thing when you open the kiln and realize you've changed your design in your head.  In this case, I decided I wanted to remove the bail I had been unhappy with all along for a coil based design.  This meant taking the torch to the piece, which took just long enough to cut the old bail off to put a small hole in its side.  Sigh.  Not to worry though, I am a big fan of Art Clay Silver's Oil Paste which was the solution to both these problems.  There are a lot of DIY metal clay oil paste recipes, but I am a big fan of a sure thing when I am already investing a fair amount of time and money.  A jar of it is a great investment to keep on hand and seems to go a very long way.  It actually has two parts - the oil (a thinning agent) and the paste (a thick, dry consistency) - you mix the two together as you go to use it.  In the case of the hole in the side, I painted it on, allowed it to dry and pasted a patch over the area.  The side view above is the same as the side view to the left with a hole in it.  I then wanted to add my new bail and coated the contact areas of the fired piece with the oil paste, allowed it to dry and attached the fresh coil.  I then re-fired it according to directions. The oil paste is able to bond with the fine silver so you can make repairs, add fine silver findings to fired pieces or even torch fire fine silver bezel wire seams.  It's one of those great materials that I wouldn't go without in the studio because that would be the very moment you needed it!

A New Twist on an Old Favorite!

The studio was briefly hijacked at the end of the summer to produce centerpieces and decorations for a dear friend's bridal shower.  She loves antiques and has a beautiful wedding gown covered in lace, which quickly became the theme we worked the day around.  I recalled some fun lamps made from antique doilies that I thought would make a great basket for our centerpieces.  They were on Dos Family Blog and the post with its simple instructions can be found here.  You can see two of my baskets below in progress.  I had a tough time finding a round beach ball, since by the end of summer the Halloween decorations are already out, so I ended up with a "ladies workout ball" from the dollar store.  It was thick and easy to inflate and deflate.  I used white school glue, for the six I made I went through close to a half gallon.  To simplify it, I placed the balls in paper bowls with the plug side down, so I would be able to access it when it came time to remove it.  Wearing gloves, I poured the glue into a paper bowl and dipped the doilies right in there to saturate them.  I squeezed the excess glue off, draped them on the ball and smoothed until they covered the way I wanted them to.  I then let them dry for 24 hours with a fan on them.

Below you can see the baskets before we filled them.  Some general tips:

When checking to see if they are dry, there will be a point where they are no longer wet, but they are soft.  You will know they are dry when they feel hard and crunchy - if you remove the interior support too soon they will collapse.

White school glue was just right for our purposes, but it is a slave to moisture and humidity.  If you want these to be more durable or appropriate for outside you should consider sealing them with a spray glaze or spray lacquer.  You will want to very slowly build up many thin coats of spray lacquer.  If you really saturate it by painting it on or spraying super heavy the glue may not hold up to the liquid and collapse.

I didn't have a bunch of old doilies laying around, but found them at a reasonable price at Factory Direct Craft where I could order them in sets of a dozen.  They have a nice variety, so if you were doing a very special piece you could order individual pieces, but the bulk worked for us.  I ordered two different sized round doilies and a set of heart shaped doilies in an ecru color to create some contrast.  Their prices were hands down the cheapest I found from a US vendor, they immediately sent a confirmation and I received my order within the week I placed it at no extra charge.  I found cheaper prices on some international sites, but many of them had ship times of up to three months and surprise charges at check out.

We filled our baskets (and the room) with paper flower pom-poms.  If you haven't made them before, they could not be more simple and Martha Stuart offers a great tutorial you can check out here.  We made varying sizes of small flowers for the centerpieces and made huge ones to fill the room and the window sills.

The key was finding a lot of tissue paper in just the two colors we wanted.  This elevated the final pieces and helped tie in our theme.  I found the colors I needed at a store called Bags & Bows that specializes in retail gift wrap supplies.  It allowed me to order a ream (400 sheets) in colors of my choice for under $20.  They have more than 100 solid colors and the economy reams start at $13.  Again, they shipped fast and the delivery was packaged well to protect the tissue paper from the elements.  

Artistic Voice

Kilauea, 2013
Ring:  Fine Silver, Lava Rock, Black Sand & Glaze

"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."  -Picasso

As the semester begins, I will spend a lot of time helping my students to push beyond the literal.  As they are asked to find inspiration for their artwork, they will also be asked to begin interpreting their own world.  I want them to understand how their experiences and perspectives shape their artistic voice.  I hope to empower them to develop original work that is all their own.  This is often hindered by the fact that they are submerged in a popular culture that is overloaded with simplistic graphic symbols for the purpose of appealing to mass audiences.  I read a very critical article this week on a professional jewelry blog about the ethics of jewelry artists stealing each others' designs.  When I scrolled down to see the images, all I could do was chuckle.  Two competing popular jewelry designers have come out with similar lines, but how either one can claim originality is laughable.  Each piece was based on common symbols such as lightning bolts, hash tags and @ symbols.  They were simple pendants in gold that all appeared to be maybe 2" in length, with one designer incorporating diamonds.  I think the only person who had a right to feel robbed was Max Miedinger who originally designed the Helvetica font these appear to be based on.  There was no transformation, so there was no artistic voice to protect and no lasting relevance to connect to.  

Kilauea Side View
(Photo Credits this page: Amber Jones, Studio Pura, LLC)

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working." -Picasso

The images in this post are from one of my most recent pieces.  Bringing this work into class served as a catalyst for our discussion on creating relevant work by interpreting our own experiences.  I am very much influenced by my environment.  Not necessarily "the environment", but my environment - wherever I am physically spending time.  I work to capture the essence of each place that influences and subsequently inspires me by eternalizing the brief moments I spend there.  This ring gives permanent form to the fleeting minutes I found myself overlooking a smoking crater in Volcanoes National Park.  It goes beyond documenting the park and becomes about documenting my experience - being mesmerized by the billowing smoke which I have interpreted through the undulating silver, being drawn into the glow in the evening from the lava interpreted through the glaze disc and having these ephemeral sensations disrupted by the rough lava rock surrounding me.  This piece began the moment I stood before this crater.  It continued as I walked the trail of devastation and eventually followed the lava flow down to where it emptied into the sea.  It began as photographs and sketches and quiet nagging thoughts of how to process a new and fundamental understanding of the actual creation of the earth.  What I find most interesting is now writing this post, I am able to make connections to pieces I was doing a decade ago.  I hadn't visited this place and I worked on a much larger scale and in completely different materials, but there are still clear visual and conceptual relationships between my work from then and now.  I remind my students that as each of our artistic voices gets stronger, we can spend less and less time laboring over what makes our work our own because the more we use it the more the visual language we develop comes naturally to us.  This means the less and less time we need to spend worrying if it will be mistaken for someone else's.  

    

Tool Review: Swanstrom Disc Cutter

Rio Grande ran a special on Swanstrom Disc Cutters last spring and I finally bought one for my classroom.    I had spent years cringing at the price, but the special had it low enough for me to finally be able to justify it.  It was worth every penny and then some!  One of the jewelry projects I do with my students is based on designing a piece that unifies the form of a dome with both texture and contrasting metals.  Some student examples from my most recent class can be seen above.  The disc cutter easily shaved more than a week off this project.  As anyone who has done doming before knows, you need to cut near perfect circles to get a good domed form.  This took a tremendous amount of time for my beginners, especially those that had more complicated designs with multiple domes.  This simple tool has you clamp the metal in the middle, select your punch and then tap it with minimal force to pop out your perfect circle.  I had an older, smaller disc cutter donated to my classroom years ago that I was never super excited by the results of, so I had not really considered the Swanstrom.  That was a mistake.  Each student was able to take the time they would have spent cutting all these circles and re-allocate it to developing more complex designs.  I have since bought a second one and it allows my class of 18 to never back up.  Pop - Pop- Pop - done!  That's how fast it is.  I can also speak to the quality of it, since it is getting regular use by a class of 18 at a time and holds up to the beating my students give it (I can not say the same for all the tools I purchase in the classroom).  Whether you are considering it for the classroom or your benchwork involves disc cutting, I would highly recommend it and the possibilities it creates.

Etching Metal Part 3: DIY Texture Plates

This three part post on etching is in conjunction with my 7/21/13 demo for the Metal Clay Artisan Guild in Connecticut.

Designs...

Etching metal can be used to create jewelry pieces, but it can also be used to create texture plates and stamps for use with metal clays and polymer clays.  Here are three designs for simple stamps using aquatint, marker and PnP resist methods to create the initial design.  Follow the link here to check out the first post on transferring your design to the metal.  If you are using a very precise design or a photograph, focus on the PnP method.  

Etching the Metal...

Once you have transferred your design to the metal, you will need to etch it.  The pieces here are wout the size of half dollars and are etched on 22 gauge copper.  If you follow the link here, you can walk through using ferric chloride to get a "salt etch" in to the metal.  I have had success using this with copper, bronze and nickel silver.

"Printing" your designs in Clay...

The copper pieces in this post are pictured next to the fine silver medallions they created.  I made a pancake of silver clay and rolled it into the copper the same way I would roll onto any other texture plate.  I had lubed each of these up with olive oil as a releasing agent and did not run into any problems with them sticking.  It took a little experimenting to get the clay the right thickness because when I rolled it too thin, the edges of the copper did rip it, but that was easy enough to work out.  This is a great solution to want to produce a limited edition series while still having the ability to make each one unique.  It would be easy enough to change the patina color, add carvings or even dome the shape of the final piece.