Eye Teeth- Final

Eye Teeth, in its final, completed iteration. I put the last coats of enamel on the mask on Friday, and created the barbed wire choker/title today. I vacillated a lot on how to display it, but I think having two white styrofoam heads on either side of the full mannequin is going to balance my final show well.

I wound up doing the nose bridge and the head attachment with braided wire (Claire's idea to braid it, mad props to her). I tried to keep it wild and organic, leaving some loose ends to curl around the sides and back.

I mimicked the wild feel of the mask with the choker, braiding it loosely and wrapping bits of wire around the connections like barbed wire. I hammered out the title piece with thin copper, so the letters are really deeply recessed. If I had had the time I would've enameled it the same colors as the mask, but I just hit it with some liver of sulfur and called it a day.

Side view- there are layers and layers (17, to be exact) of subtle greens, browns and reds in the mask, but they're mostly lost in the picture. I enameled the spikes of the eyes and ends with opaque black, which is again, too subtle to be really picked up by the camera.

Close up to give some idea of the colors that went into the mask. I built up more enamel in this piece than I ever have before, mostly because it took that long for me to be satisfied with it.

I'm really happy with this one as my final major piece of metal working. Tomorrow's the last critique of the term, I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else's been up to.

Enameling=love

Oh, I heart it so.

I've been making leetle enamel samples for the past week, all with drilled holes for potential jump-ring necklace attachment. One of my classmates has been making these gorgeous luminescent pieces with layers of transparent enamel, which encouraged me to try firing with less enamel.

The PROBLEM with enamel samples is they're so deceptively easy. I get lured away from my projects by the kiln to slap a couple of layers on a scrap of copper in the morning, and the next thing I know the studio's closing and all I have to show for it is these little glass bits and pieces looking up at me all innocently from my desk, next to the work I was supposed to be doing all day.

The back of the above, rocking two layers of transparent turquoise and starting to develop firescale because I really should have used more counter.

I was a little annoyed by my lack of foresight with the other skull (absence of jump ring for awesome jewelry purposes), so I decided to do a cloisonne one using my silver wire. Unfortunately, I put it in the wrong kiln without thinking and melted silver all over the damn piece. I cleaned it up a little yesterday, but it still looks wonky and matte.

Cloisonne-thulhu. The old ones made me do it.

This was the most obnoxious, finicky piece to finish, which is appropriate I suppose. All those little tentacles are hell to wetpack, but I did like leaving it textured a bit instead of all glossy.

This is one I did for my friend Wes, who runs the circus barn where I train. The text is from a tattoo he has that I've always loved.

And the back, with his name on it so I wouldn't be tempted to keep it for myself. I want to make a few more pieces to give away to my friends, particularly the circus folks I train with who I can really easily imagine translating into enamel art, personality wise.

One last one, a tiny ouroboros that I made with Shira in mind. I'm really pleased with how I got the cloisonne to spill over the edge of the metal and still be able to hold enamel.

More sexy glass metal to come! I've got another month in the studio if anyone wants to commission an enameled piece. Text (like the fuck love make art piece) is particularly easy to make happen, cloisonne is much more complicated and labor intensive. Let me make your ideas into artstuffs!

Anti-VD Heart piece

Slightly belated, I know, but I spent Valentines day being unbelievably romantical, which is so completely out of character for me I never got around to posting my yearly anti-VD art piece. This year I was experimenting with enameling, and was shooting to do a stamped letters under transparent enamel heart. That...obviously did not happen. And hence the recent obsession with making technical samples before slapping enamel on projects.

The good thing that came out of this project was that I learned a hell of a lot about wetpacking and manipulating wet enamel. I redid the lettering about 10 times before I was satisfied, and by then I felt I really had a good handle on the process. It still feels unfinished to me, and I'd like to enamel a thick chain of some sort to the spiky handles when I have some time to kill in the studio.

This is the back- I used clear flux as counter enamel, which is what I really should have done to preserve the original stamped text in the first place. C'est la vie.

Mistakes are learning!

Finally

The other day, a friend said I was a saint. I said, if I was a saint, I was a seriously burnt out one.

It got me to wondering if martyrs felt relieved when they died. You spend all this time among people who hate you, or fear you, and generally never understand you, and you create death as this place where you can go to finally be understood. I wanted to develop the crowd at the bottom more to suggest a world that despised the person they were killing, but I never got around to working back into the piece.

In my head, when I read the "finally", I imagine the martyr thinking "took them long enough".

(chalk pastel and charcoal on butcher paper. As if there is any other media.)

I realized today that if you click the image, it blows it up to full quality. Hit that!

Blaargh

From the outside, I'm a highly functional being, capable of walking upright and completing a ridiculous amount of work in a single day. On the inside, I tend to feel like this. Prone exhausted and with a furiously twitching leg that just wants to KICK EVERYTHING in the FACE.

This is the first piece of a backlog of about a weeks worth of images with notes from that day I drew them. As much as I like posting work as I make it, the buffer comforts me. Once I streamline the reproduction of work to interweb process, it'll be a lot more immediate.

Apologies for the quality- tomorrow I conquer the copy stand at school and all will be light balance and roses.