Quick and Easy Grunge Effects...

These are the earrings I made for the last AJE COM challenge and in post for that I mentioned using solder paste to 'grunge  up' the copper washers I was using. Several people has since asked me exactly what I did so I thought I'd share the process here.

Everybody loves a bit of grunge these days it seems and while I was attaching ear wires to the copper washers for these earrings I decided to change the characteristic of the washers very quickly with some solder paste and, if you have some to hand you can do the same. As you probably know solder paste already has flux mixed in with it so it flows very easily. It's not cheap though so you can create interesting effects with just a little touch here and there (I tend to scrape the gungy bits out of the cap for this purpose) although I've used more in these photos just to make it clearer.

So the first step is to place your your clean washer or copper blank on your solder block or charcoal and dot some paste on it...this can be evenly spread or pretty random depending on what effect you're after.  Then you simply heat up the piece with a torch aiming the flame at the metal rather than the paste. The paste will begin to bubble then turn shiny and flow and by moving your torch around you can draw the solder around your blank. Once the solder has melted switch off the torch and quench the piece in cold water.

Of course this process will also work with tiny pallions of traditional strip solder although you will need to use flux with this to get it to flow as with the piece below. I think this method would probably work better by heating the piece from beneath as if sweat soldering but unfortunately I couldn't use this method as one of the legs of my soldering tripod has gone missing and a two legged tripod is about as much use as a chocolate teapot!

Once your pieces are quenched (left hand image below) you can can pickle them to remove the firescale (bottom right image below), tumble, patinate and/or texture them as you wish. Personally I like the effect of the firescale so I tend to remove any that is loose or flaky with a sanding sponge and then texture and polish which can result in some interesting finishes (top right image below). The one thing to remember if you don't tumble is that you have in effect annealed your piece while soldering so it will be soft so work hardening with a leather or nylon mallet is a good idea.

If you give this a go do let us see what you make - you can post pictures on our Facebook page and we'd love to see them.

Lesley

Tattooed Mice

Don't worry - no animals were harmed in the writing of this post!

You may remember a few months ago Caroline wrote a post about china painting as a way of decorating glazed ceramic. I knew I wanted to give this a go and went straight on line and bought a selection of paints which come in these adorable tiny jars...they've been sitting in a cupboard ever since!

Well yesterday I finally got around to using them. I'd made some little mouse charms and unusually for me glazed them in pastel shades which I felt needed jazzing up a bit. They have little tails on one side but I thought maybe a little tattoo on the other cheek might look cute.

Rather stupidly I forgot to take a photo of me working with the paints but you can find more about the process on Caroline's post. Basically you mix the finely powdered paint with a medium - either a commercial one or an improvised one as I did - I used 7UP. Then it's 'simply' a case of painting on your chosen design. Actually I found it anything but simple - I'm not good at small detail and it's very difficult to hold onto and paint on a tiny object with curved surfaces even with the simplistic designs I was trying to achieve. Needless to say there was frequent dropping, cleaning and starting again.

But I persevered and eventually ended up with all my meeces sporting a little heart or flower tattoos and ready for firing...

Compared to glaze firing this is a pretty quick process whereby you fire the kiln straight up to 700ºc and then let it cool straight back down. This is how they finished up.

I'm not entirely happy with them as I think they're a bit untidy. What I should have done is practice on an old plate or tile first to get a feel for the paints but when did I ever do anything that sensible? I'm sure I'll improve with practice though - even if I do have to decorate all my table china to do it!

Lesley
The Gossiping goddess

The Good, The Bad and the Downright Odd...

Well my new studio has been up and running for about six weeks now and it's finally beginning to feel like a real creative space...yep, despite having all that storage space - it's a mess! I am trying to be good though and tidy up a bit more but it's such a luxury to have so much space to work in that I can't help flexing my creative muscles and spreading out all over the place.

 Aside from the space, the biggest joy is that the studio has a dedicated water supply (rather than the bathroom I was using and wrecking before) which means that I can now get down to some of the things that were just impractical before.

Back in October of last year I went on an etching course and last week I finally got my kit set up and spent many hours playing to my hearts content. The picture above is some of my pieces floating in their etch bath attached to pieces of packing foam - one of the tips picked up on the course and a great idea as the floats double up as handles too.

I decided the best way to get my hand back in was to just go over what I'd learnt in October and I started off with one of the easiest resists - craft outline stickers...

These are cheap and so simple to use and they produced really strong well defined edges. These were etched for just 45 minutes although I didn't stick the top one on its float properly and it fell off, but even so it produced a pretty good etch sitting on the bottom of the bath.

The only  down side to these is that there is a limited subject matter available - for me anyway but this is not really a problem when you have a die cutting machine just waiting to be put to work making your own vinyl stickers...next on the list and another post I'm sure.

After that I moved onto PNP (Press and Peel) photo transfer paper as my resist. With this you photocopy your designs onto the blue paper or film and then press it on to your metal using an iron.

 

There is a bit more guess work with this in getting the timing and heat right and making sure you don't get lint or bubbles between the two. If you can get that right though you can also get some really good clean etches...

Original French Art Deco design

One of the things I like about PNP is that you can etch very intricate and pictorial designs and I've been collecting images for this ever since the course and couldn't wait to use them but, this is where I learnt some new lessons. While I was merrily photocopying my images it completely escaped me that when they were transferred from the PNP they would be reversed and that when the copper was etched  would be negatives of the original image - doh!

That's not necessarily a disaster though as with this piece for example... although the original black and white image is very strong I still like the way it has come out in reverse and for a jewellery piece I think it works well - I love the fine detailing.

Original French Art Deco design

I've also used alcohol ink in my work for the first time on these pieces. I wanted there to be a differentiation between this and my bronze clay work and I like the subtlety of the finish the inks give.

On this next piece - an illustration by Aubrey Beardsley (not the Lone Ranger...) the negative image had a more, shall we say interesting effect...

 It's rather odd and this 'oddness' has been exacerbated by the fact that I decided to go for broke and see what it looked liked domed. The reflection in the photograph has given is a three dimensional effect and while it's rather strange there is something about it that draws me to it and who knows...it may well generate ideas of it's own in the future.

And then of course there are some images that just don't work like this lovely image of a group of mermaids (apologies for poor quality) which is just too detailed to see clearly in the negative.

However, even this has a silver lining and since the etch is clean and deep I am hoping that I can use it as a texture plate with metal clay - much as old illustrations were made from etched plates.

Fortunately for me photo editing software allows me to flip images and invert them to negatives before I transfer them so in future, I can choose how I want them to be - note to self to do just that!

So all in all I had great fun with this, learnt a few lessons and continue to broaden my knowledge and skills base. There may even been a little collaboration between myself and another AJE colleague coming out of this but you'll just have to wait and see what that is.

I hope you found this interesting and if anyone has any etching tips they'd like to share, as always they will be gratefully accepted.

Lesley
The Gossiping Goddess