The end of the semester was unsurprisingly hectic, made especially so because I left the country for the last week of classes, so I had to get everything finished a week early. I didn’t have time to update this journal along way, so…

Drawing 1

For our fourth project, we did an interior scene with figures on toned paper. I ended up doing two different pieces, both in colored pencil. The first was on purple paper and was a scene from the Kælan Mikla concert at the Empire Garage.

I did the second on gray paper of Bogart in the living room. I’m pretty happy with it as a portrait of a cat, but it didn’t look like Bogart, so I spent some time doing head studies of him.

The fifth project was an ink drawing. This was my first experimentation with ink washes (excluding the washes I did on Warhammer minis), and with nib pens. Wanting something with deep blacks, I did a portrait of a Chihuahuan raven, then a cropped version, and I wanted to play with the washes more and test out masking fluid, so I did a reverse piece where I masked off the raven shape and washed the background.

Design 2

After making tiles using my first plaster mold, I then cast the tiles to produce a relief. I stained this plaster piece with thinned acrylic gouache.

The final project in Design 2 was a stop motion animation. We had to pick two objects, one animal and the other technological and animate the transformation of one into the other. We did a 50/50 intermediate sculpture, and photographed the process of each of the “end” objects transforming into the intermediate.

I learned a lot about the process of sculpture in this project. We started with multiple angles of reference photos. We scaled them to the desired size (5” along the longest axis). Using calipers (the tong style, not machinist’s calipers), we took lots of measurements of the photos and transferred them to the sculpture, adding and subtracting clay to make it work.

If I ever need to do another stop motion animation, I’m going to find an onion-skin app to help with positioning. The project included building a light box out of cardboard and white paper, but I couldn’t really do the sculpture in place in the box, so I had to take it out and try to re-place it in the same spot. The result was unnecessarily jerky.

Metalsmithing

I made a candelabra for my final smithing project. I wanted to include some techniques that I hadn’t tried before, including collaring pieces together and twisting multiple rods into a spiral. My final result didn’t look much like my sketch, because as I worked through building it, I saw different things I could do and did them instead of sticking to my plan. I forged a ring and decided to make the “legs” candle spikes as well.

Both collaring and twisting turned out to be complex for work-holding reasons. The teacher demonstrated collaring two square rods together, but I had to make things hard for myself by trying to do three round rods. Unlike in the square case, you can’t use the flat of the anvil to hold the closed side of the collar closed while you hammer together the two open ends.

I ended up using hose clamps to hold the pieces in the right general orientation, and cutting a V block to hold things during the collaring.

Intermediate Layout & Fabrication

The papercraft raven project went well.

Cutting even complex flat pieces was pretty straightforward using the various shear options. I used the stomp shear for cutting down sheets to manageable sizes and cutting long edges on convex exteriors. The die shear was good for short straight cuts at the edges, like the feather tips and tabs for joining different pieces. The Beverly shear made long cuts (even curved ones) pretty straightforward. There were a few cuts, particularly between the feathers, that I used a bandsaw for, but later discovered that they were easier on the Beverly. And, of course, there were always aviation snips for the small things that had to be done by hand.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’d expected to use the brake to create precise angles, but I instead got them close-ish by eye, and then fine-tuned them once they were at least tacked in place. For folds shorter than 3-4”, the hand bender was great. For longer ones, clamping a straight edge and pressing worked. Some of the fine tuning in confined spaces was easiest with a rawhide mallet and a sharp-edged stake. I made one narrow stake out of a piece of bar, and used a folding stake for other bends.

Creating a closed form with the spot welder was, as expected, impossible. The contacts of the welder need to be on opposite sides of the sheets being joined, which would have meant one needed to be inside of the sculpture for the final connections. Instead of spot welding, I used rivets to close up the back.

I’d hoped to get a deep glossy black using a patina instead of paint. I tried a number of “cold blue” formulations, which result in black oxide coatings, but none of them were actually very dark and they didn’t have the deep luster I was hoping for, so I ended up spray painting the whole thing black. I’ve bought some iridescent coatings, but am going to have to figure out how to thin them down a lot before I’d use them.

Incidentally, I discovered that there are (at least) two metal finishing products called “Black Magic”. One is intended for maintaining firearms, and the other for sculpture. I tried the former, but maybe I’d have better results with the latter.