Eye Teeth Mask- Work in Progress

This is my final mask for class, in all its eye-eating glory. I've been wacking at it (read: smithing) to try to get the shape right all today, and I'm fucking wiped. Also, thanks to all my work doing masks this term, I really hate noses. Useless, pointless facial mistakes. I tried to avoid the Nose Problem with a little piece of chain mail, but that still didn't totally solve it. Ideas, world?

It's still very much unfinished- I have the rest of the week to pour into it- and the way it sits on my face needs to be tweaked. Right now I've got a single-link chain attaching at the side spike and in the back, but that's not doing what I need it to.

The one element I really like and am running with is the bowl-shape goggle look. The eyes are very recessed behind the teeth/spikes, and it makes for a nice deep shadow.

One last profile shot because my eyes look creeeepy underneath this piece. All my work thus far in the term has involved on putting dangerous things by my eyes (sharp pointy metal, broken glass), but I think this is the only one where I've deliberately made spikes that came IN towards my ocular cavity.

I'm planning to enamel these, probably with a dirty, fluxxed white-to-red color gradation. I like the idea of red coming down the points, because my work clearly isn't disturbing enough without those implications.

Marquis de Sade collar

One of these days I'll stop using that Marquis de Sade quote as my fall-back inspiration, but for this collar I threw together in class over the past 2 days, I think it's fairly appropriate. One of my classmates made this bad-ASS pierced animal skull choker for our cold joining sample and it made it realize that I all I want in life (or at least in metal shop) is to make huge, constraining, mildly uncomfortable pseudo-BDSM-esque collars.

I had a much easier time with the jump rings and I actually spent most of our class discussion quietly joining them into a chain with pliers- like knitting, but sooo much cooler. I also used a patina for the first time! And it promptly rubbed off all over my neck as soon as I put it on. But it looks hella cool.

I did liver of sulfur on the plates, and ferric nitrate on the jump rings, which was an exciting experiment in making tiny things very hot very quickly

I don't have much artistic thought to attach to this piece- I like collars, I like collars I put on myself, I like making impractical accessories. This was mostly a practice run to get a feel for this shape and size on my neck.

Slightly shaky shot of the back of my neck- the chain holds it on pretty nicely, despite a very simplified clasp. The bright spots up at the top are my nape piercing.

Whee collars! Next step- fixing the patina so it doesn't turn my neck black and blue (not that that's weird, but with acro training I don't need any extra bruising in odd places).

Massively Impractical Ring of Fire!

I made a highly impractical ring today! If you look closely, you can see my incredibly inexpert silver soldering, but it hasn't fallen apart yet, so I consider that a bonus. I've been playing around with this idea of putting two wings on either side of a ring, but when I finished sawing it looked more like a plume of flame, so I'm running with that idea instead.

The circular part was a class assignment to solder a ring, which took fer-frickin-ever for my first try manipulating large gauge copper wire. Filing it flat took ages, and now I have fresh knowledge of the healing powers of silver solder.

I am terrifically excited for when we start patinas- doing everything in light salmon colored copper is getting old fast. I liked this ring better when it was all dusty and fire rough, pre-shining and cleaning up.

(OH MY GOD YOU GUYS I LOVE METALSMITHING SO FUCKING MUCH AND IT'S ONLY GETTING BETTER AHHHH)

Oly Type

Homework from my summer printmaking design class- create typographically diverse alphabet from local signage. Olympia is a stupidly easy town to do this in- it only took me 15 minutes taking pictures downtown to get all these typefaces. And I left a bunch out because I didn't have time to go into all the alleys and hunt down my favorite murals.

(Props to any Oly folks who can identify where I got more than half of these from).

The Reach (WIP)

One of the first things I learned when I started performing was that unless your parents were somehow coming to every show you did, no one in your audience actually wanted to see you succeed. The reason we incorporate dangerous things into our acts, the whole basis behind dumb stunts for money, the sharper or more on fire your props are- the more the audience is hoping you'll fuck up, just for them.

I like to motivate myself before I go on by deciding not to give them the satisfaction.

Another piece for my class show, although it's drawing from the emotional black hole that has reared its ugly head yet again. I used to incorporate a lot of garroting wire into my work back in high school, this is another iteration of that.

I'm pretty unhappy with how this is looking, and it's a struggle to get art to work at all right now for me. Suggestions appreciated, particularly for a background.