Underwater Marvels Propel My Art
Using the yellow molding rubber, I’m molding a bottleneck ring and also a custom order signet ring. I’d like both rings to be a little bit smaller than the originals are.
Last night I spent several hours with my good friends Pat and Kathleen playing with Bronze and Copper metal clay for the first time. They are prepping for a hands-on workshop on Feb 8th in Los Gatos for the local metal clay group (SFBASCG.)
As a bonus, I talked with Pat’s newly certified diving husband about his first dive trip. We also talked about places we’d like to go diving; our lists are both long. 🙂
A fresh iteration of the “Bottleneck” ring design. All peridots. Four flush set and one prong set. The ring is ‘fresh’ because it’s less than 2 hours old. 🙂
Please pardon the hot spots and other issues with the photos. I’ll take a nice photo for the website someday….
While watching TV these past couple of weeks, I’ve also been working on some new combinations in knitted wire chain. I tried mixing copper and fine silver wire at the same time, copper only, two strands of fine silver, and increasing and decreasing the size of my loops.
I’m seeing a funky bracelet in this sampler piece. Now it’s time to create the sample where I pull the chain through the drawplate to see how my double strand pieces look once drawn….
Results from electrolytic saltwater etching of copper
In my days at a semiconductor capital equipment company I made a lifelong friend. When we first met, she was a “process” engineer who etched the dielectric material on silicon wafers; then she etched conductive materials; then she was a product support engineer, et cetera.
A month ago I showed her the Art Jewelry magazine article on etching copper, nickel silver, brass and other materials in a salt water solution using a D cell battery. As an etcher, she was very interested. She’d never etched at home. Her current company (where they have a chemical that etches metal in only 20 seconds) is on holiday break, so this week she’s free to come out and play.
Play we did – in our nerdy way. The local Radio Shack had only one single D cell battery holder, prompting an etching experiment. I purchased the single D holder, and also holders for a single C and two Cs.
We placed two sets of copper anodes and cathodes in almost identical etch setups at the same time. The main differences between the two was the number of C batteries and the resist designs on the copper.
Loooooook at the difference in the water color after a few minutes. The double C setup skipped the blue-green water phase and headed right to the orange water phase of the process. After five minutes the copper had significantly etched. After an hour, the copper was more than ready to be taken out. The single C battery tub etched much slower; after 2 hours the depth of the etch was still shallower than the 1 hour double C etch.
We etched both sides of the anode and purposely ignored recommendations to duct tape the edges – as you can see on Ben’s piece at the far left.
Next time the process will be tweaked a little. Some rubber cement on the lead to the anode. Alligator clips instead of twisted and wrapped wires. Perhaps try a new type of metal. Duct tape on the edges. And, we’ll measure the voltage and current from the single and double C setups and compare to the recommended single D setup.
By the way, we were shocked not to find a molecular orbital diagram of the process on wikipedia! 😉
As promised…here are some photos of the brass bracelet and copper piece I was experimenting with in October.
I left the brass bracelet in the fuming container much longer than recommended, and the colored patina you saw in October washed off. Now that I’ve pushed that patina past it’s time limit, I’ll revisit it again someday and see how long to fume it so the blue greens stay.
The moist sorrel washed off, leaving nice colors on the copper sample.
My favorite new copper patina is shown below on flat and hammered copper samples. The fuming recipe is comprised of sea salt, cream of tartar, and vinegar.
You can read more about the cream of tartar patina in my “Accessible Patinas” article in the upcoming zine which Catherine Witherell and Deryn Mentock are publishing in January 2009.
Another fun result from the copper patina experiments is a mottled blue / green from sal ammoniac and tobacco. The results lead me to wonder what would happen if I ground up the tobacco even finer before this immersion process.
Here’s a closeup look at the flat piece after rinsing
Today I met with Yan Liu, co-owner of Lireille Gallery of Contemporary Jewelry and Art. If you stop by Lireille Gallery, you can now see seventeen of my necklaces, 30 pairs of earrings, and 20 rings. If you’d like a preview of my art work at Lireille Gallery, I created a catalog of the items in the gallery and posted it on my website on the gallery page.
One of the two new rings I created the night before is shown below. I took my cast sterling bottleneck ring design and applied texture and patina. The liver of sulfur left a very interesting purplish pink color in the grooves after the ring was cleaned in the ultrasonic. The flush set stones are 2mm and 2.5mm white topaz. (sorry for the picture quality – I should have left time for a photo session.) If you’d like a better look – it’s in the Lireille Gallery.
I also took the same Bottleneck design in sterling silver, with the same textured finish, left it unpatinated and flush set 2mm peridot stones.
I like playing with the finishes and patinas. Which reminds me, I promised some more of my patina experiment pics in an earlier post which I’ll get to soon.
Here’s the rainbow over 880 seen on my way to Lireille Gallery.
The Virgin Artists’ 6th Annual Show and Sale in Cupertino.
I ran across the Too Precious to Wear website today http://www.tooprecioustowear.org/
I think the site does a nice job of providing an overview of the affect that coral collecting has; both scientifically and on the local economies. The site also provides a list of alternatives to using coral.
Those of you who know me already know that the sea environment is important to me. A trip to Cocos Island years ago highlighted the difference in fish and crustacean populations in a managed marine reserve vs. the open fishing which goes on in most of our oceans. The marine reserve around Cocos was lush relatively speaking, but our dive guide who’d been visiting for 20 years said that even the reserve was far less lush than it had been in the past. The creatures go in and out of the reserve, and many are fished and can’t come back.
On several trips to Belize over the years, I’ve noticed the dwindling coral populations and the decline in reef fish populations. Since the fish help the coral by cleaning off algae and the coral are often the nurseries for the fish, when one or both are affected, both populations decline.
Growing at rates of 0.6 cm – 3.9 cm / year, the colonies of tiny animals known collectively as coral are very vulnerable to man made disruptions. And, since they are animals (not just the calcified shells of these animals that people collect in their homes once they are dead), I prefer to leave them alone. My jewelry is designed to showcase their beauty and share the experience of seeing coral without using coral directly.
I travel with molding compound and sit on the beach with dead coral, shells and lava bits I gather from the beach. I mold these natural objects so I can take their textural beauty home with me. When I’m finished molding the coral, shells and lava bits, I put them back where I found them so that nature can continue on with it’s processes. The bits eventually decompose, but in the meantime they can be homes for tiny creatures.
Once I’m back home, I use the molded textures in my creations, and all these years later I’m still amazed by the variety of shapes I find. I’m also amazed by the similarities I can find in coral textures from different parts of the world.
I’ve include two pictures that show some of the coral diversity I’ve found and incorporated into my jewelry. The “Modern Cameo” line of jewelry as seen in “Craters” at the top of this post, ask the question “What’s more precious? The profile of a person you don’t know in a traditional cameo, or nature?”
If you’re interested in the science, you can read more about coral growth rates at these sites:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Coral_growth_and_climate_change
http://www.grisda.org/origins/06088.htm
If you’d like to see more coral textures in fine silver, check out my website: http://sherrycordova.com/