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Hydraulic Press Demo

At last weekends Metal Arts Association of Silicon Valley meeting we watched a demonstration of the Hydraulic Press by local artist and educator Edith Sommer.

Here are some of her aluminum dies and resulting copper forms, along with some of her other tricks such as gasket rubber to make the shape deeper and wire taped to cardboard for embossing.

Edith Sommer demonstrating the hydraulic press

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Fave New Book

I’m loving the book “The Colouring, Bronzing and Patination of Metals” by Richard Hughes and Michael Rowe. (Click on the title to see the book.)
Since I’m more of a “thanks for the suggested starting point” type of person, for the most part I’m using the endless patina recipes in the book as a very nice place to start. Here are a couple of the things I’ve learned….
When you boil sorrel in water to obtain the oxalic acid, and use the water with some of the now sad looking sorrel, you’ll see the copper in this type of blue mess after about a week:

Stay tuned for more photos of what the pieces look like after they’ve been cleaned off.
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Three Pomegranates

I’m pretty pleased with the pomegranates that rose out of the 22 gauge copper sheet brought to my first Chasing and Repousse’ workshop! Davide Biggazzi is an excellent instructor, and yes – he did a small bit of the work on this piece. Nothing like working directly on the piece to show the technique when moving along in the steps of the process…. 

Starting with this outline from Davide, I punched and punched the dots around the tracing paper to transfer the image to the copper sheet.

We worked the back of the piece (repousse’), then switched to the front of the piece to refine the design (chasing). A couple minor touchups were then made on the back and front (by Davide) once the piece had been removed from the pitch bowl.

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Nice! -and- Patinas

Emanuela Duca has some very nice pieces of jewelry on her site. Clicking the title of this post will take you to her site.


Back to work! For the upcoming SFBASCG meeting in Los Gatos, I’m preparing a patina demo on brass, copper, and silver. I enjoyed experimenting with different materials last year when I gave a patination demo for the Metal Arts Association of Silicon Valley. 

Results of last years demo are shown below. The tobacco patina was interesting because the coarse and fine tobacco resulted in very different patinas. The friend that went with me to the smoke shop to purchase pipe tobacco for the demo was just asking me about the tobacoo patina the other day. She finds it amusing and interesting. Aren’t we artists odd?!