Some Art to Shake Things Up

Great news!  I remembered to take (almost) step-by-step pictures of one of my art projects.  What I mean by almost is I may have forgotten to photograph a couple steps.  Even though I have been taking the half-year jewelry/metals art class since January, I keep forgetting to take pictures.  This time, I made sure to do it.  I have also been eating to post about something other than soccer.  First, there is the high probability you readers are bored of it and second, I don’t really feel like describing how we tied, again, despite the face we were up 2-0 (so it really felt like a loss).

For this art project, we made pendents which will go on a necklace.  These pendents consisted of two pieces of metal that were soldered together (solder is pronounced with a silent “l,” like “sodder”).   Soldering is a technique where two pieces of metal are connected through a lot of heat and tiny bits of metal that act as glue (between the two pieces) when melted.  My last project involved putting two layers of metal by cold-connection which is accomplished by using rivets.  Riviting is a whole other process, but the point is each project incorporates a new method of metal making, each one harder than the last.

Another requirement of the pendents was the piece had to have negative space, or in special cases, just a really complicated top piece design.  I decided to have negative space with a relatively simple top piece.  If you don’t understand what is being described here, don’t worry, it will make more sense when you see the pictures.

The first step was designing the piece and drawing it out on paper.

I decided to go with a moon (representing water) and fire.  These two things symbolize opposites and balance (at least, to me).  They do come from the show, "Avatar: The Last Airbender," if they seemed familiar.  My plan was to have the bottom piece be nickel silver and the top piece (the fire) be brass which looks like gold.  My negative space would come from sawing a crescent moon out of the nickel silver.  Of course, we had to brainstorm other designs as well.  One of my other options was a leaf where the veins would be a sheet of metal on top another sheet of metal.

Next, put in a metal order and acquire your metal.

Nickel silver and brass squares of metal.

On a plain piece of paper, I drew out my design, cut it out, and glued it onto my metal.  I used rubber cement so I could just peel it off when I was done sawing.

This is just a simple outline of my bottom piece.

In this class, we use a thin handsaw to cut our metal.

 Then, cut out either top or bottom piece.  In my case it was the bottom piece.

Bottom piece.

Follow with sawing out the other piece.

Top piece.

Put them on top of each other to make sure everything fits right.

As you can see, I needed to do some filing in order to shorten the ends of the fire.
I also did filing to touch up all the other edges.

Here is another picture of my pieces.

After filing and sanding the pieces (sanding helps the solder a bit), I washed my pieces extremely well with dish soap.  Washing removes any oils from the metal; it is very important to have a clean piece when soldering.  Sorry, I don't have a picture of this.

Now on to the hard part: soldering.  Since this is a pretty complicated process that would take to long to explain in detail, here is a picture of when I am finished soldering my pieces together.

As I mentioned earlier, soldering involves quite a bit of heat.  Little torches are used and when you heat up metal to this degree, it does't exactly look pretty.  The green stuff you see is called flux, which is a alien-green watery liquid that you paint onto where you want the flux to flow.  Soldering also causes fire-scale on a piece.  However, all of this goes away after putting your piece in the pickle for a few minutes.  The pickle is a chemical that gets rid of heat coloring on metal.

Upon taking it out of the pickle, my piece looked like this.

Much better, right?

You might have noticed that these are not the same colors I started out with, and I still needed to do some cleaning up around the fire.  This is where sanding comes in, once more, because it removes the pickle, like scratching off a coat of paint.  Afterwards, I buffed it to make it look much more shiny and painted Liver of Sulfur (a chemical that colors the metal) on the fire to add contrast.  This took me a couple of tries because I couldn't get it "just right."  Oh, and I drilled a hole at the top to the necklace string.

Unfortunately, I got so excited that I forgot to take pictures of the previous actions, so here is what my piece looked like at the end of class on Friday.

I kind of like it, but I kind of don't, you know what I mean? ;)

I may or may not change it next class because I have yet to decide if I like how the fire looks.  I kind of wanted it lighter, without bits of blue and purple, more of a dark golden color, but who knows?  Maybe I'll change my mind after thinking about it over the next few days.