I’ve been stressed, what with the country of my birth being deliberately ransacked, but have managed to make some progress in class.

Drawing 1

We’re working on landscapes/atmospheric perspective. I chose a particularly difficult scene. Nighttime, illuminated from within the frame, and foggy.

This is a picture of the cathedral in Guarda, Portugal. We were having dinner at a restaurant on the square. After the meal, we walked out to find the square filled with otherworldly fog. There are lights set in the ground aimed at the cathedral, and they shone through to fog onto the building.

Design 2

The second assignment was to build an enclosure for our first sculpture in wire.

You may recall my first sculpture was a 5-fold rotationally symmetric collection of geometric shapes. I doubled down on the geometry, building a pentacular (five pointed star) base around the bottom of the sculpture with a hexagonal tower rising above it. I painted it “Venom”, a yellow-green to contrast with the magenta-violet painting of the first sculpture.

Metalsmithing

I finished up the hook.

Since last post, I decided to add a twist to the sections between the center hook and the outer hooks. This would have been wildly easier if I’d done it before bending the outer hooks. I also turned the spirals at the ends of the outer hooks upwards (this I had planned), and added rubbed brass to those sections before coating the piece in paste wax.

And made a bottle opener (two, actually). The bottle opener introduced a bunch of new techniques. I broadened a taper to make a leaf. I created a hole with a slot punch and then drifted it to a larger size. I also used a fuller to form the tongue.

Intermediate Layout & Fabrication

After a series of projects from plans, we’ve started projects where we try to copy something, making whatever plans we need along the way.

In addition to the shearing and braking in the first set of projects, this introduced rolling. I rolled simple cylinders and also conic sections. I used a bead roller to add edge details to make joins.