New Directions: Wall sculpture, small sculpture

I think it might be fun to add a new line to the things to sell and eventually do that only. I like things for the house. Wall sculpture, hangings, garden sculpture. There's just so much jewelry and not so much original art for the wall. Not sculptural things, anyway. I am going to start this week.
I've started making a picture frame for a show I am going to be in next month. I have to frame a piece of jewelry in a 12"x12" frame. Since I use a lot of copper, I am covering and extending a nicely shaped frame I found in a garage sale yesterday, but it's too small. I'm cutting out the copper in four mitered pieces and hammering each piece to give it texture. then nailing them to the wood frame with tiny little brass escutcheon pins. I've gotten two sides done and it's coming along pretty well. Then I think I'll put an aqua patina on it . It's a pretty large expanse of copper to leave as is. I can see this as a start to the wall sculpture thing. The frame is the primary interest, then put a small assemblage in the center. I'm folding under the edges of the frame to give it more stiffness. I think this metal I'm using is about 22 to 24 gauge. I can think of a lot of ways to decorate future frames. Etch, hammer more, but that's really exhausting. I think I could buy molding to make a base for it so it would have some curviness. I would like that more than just a boxy thing...

Other materials I'm thinking about are :

concrete patch....like one I did in a Penland class. Put a little mirror on it and some ceramic for a little mosaic and strips of copper I swirled around and just the edge showing.

Hardware cloth as a base, larger squares. Repeat elements on it.

CLOCKS!!! Like the woman I did at Penland. It was a little sculpture. Slate base, copper tubing legs, copper tube face and wire hair and face. a black square of counter top sample. clock mechanism. It was so cute. I should look for a picture of it.

Mosaics as one element. especially for yard sculpture.

Collect more found objects. I need to find some junk yards. I don't want to do anything too large that would be hard to tote around or ship.

Tagua nuts: I've got to get some ideas for carving them. They're like ivory, so nesuke comes to mind. I should go google that.

Themes to consider.....primitive/jungle, animals with people, make smaller elements that can
be combined. Like the black "egg" as a seed pod with foliage around it. I wonder where Madalyn gets her brass leaves and stuff. I need to google again and also look at the metal books.

Well, this is a starting point. I'm doing this form my own use but I guess it helps to see how people work, so if it helps anyone, good.

Riveting rivets...

I did a lot of cold connections before I could solder, but I still love them. Especially since they can do connections with materials that wouldn't stand up to the heat involved with soldering. Until I figure out how to use othe people's pictures, I will just have to use mine as examples. I connected this blackened steel to the silver backing with tiny brass escutcheon pins. I couldn't have soldered the blackened steel.

This is another colored steel, but this time I colored rusted steel and did silver tube rivets in the holes in the steel strip. These rivets didn't connect anything, they were just a decorative element. I used the little brass rivets to connect it to the silver back. Instead of connecting it directly to the back, though, I used tiny silver tubes between the two pieces to give it some elevation.

This is another example of using the little silver tubes to raise the top piece above the backing. This way I could slip the shell and twigs between the two pieces and that helped contain the things.

Another thing about rivets is that they can allow two pieces to swivle if you leave a little space between the two layers to be connected. You can use a little piece of paper to act as spacer, then you remove it to allow the swivelling. I don't have any examples of this.

Color in JEWELRY

People think primarily of precious gems when they think of color in jewelry, but there are so many other possibilities.

1.patinas with chemicals, heat (makes copper red)

2.mosaic of glass seed beads.

3.Prismacolor pencils on oxidized metal.

4, Use of found objects such as colored porcelain shards

How many ways can you come up with....

duffydesigns

Actually, the fourth picture is my little Maisy when she was a baby. She is now a year old.

duffydesigns

The pictures are of ways I've "captured" things that people had thought were special. I had written about this and wanted to add the images, but somewhere in the ether it got lost. I will figure this thing out soon, I know. How hard could it be?