I’ve been working away on ideas for the 7 Sails project and have been toying with the idea of creating three little sculptures or three brooches. Working with copper and my electronic components I want to create 3D swarming princesses as depicted in the painting by Sarah Roberts. I’m still not sure whether they’re going to be sculptures or brooches yet and I’m at a stage where I can still play around with ideas and see what happens.
So far I’ve cut out three squares from a large copper sheet – large, medium and small. I’ve then marked a circle onto each and drawn lines radiating from the centre point so that I can mark where I want to drill my holes. I’ve then punched each of these marks so that I have a position for each hole to be drilled. It then took quite a while to drill all the holes into each square, but once done they were ready to be annealed. I heated each square until red hot and then left them all to cool.
Once cooled I used a doming block and a wooden dopping hammer to create my domes. The hammering process not only domes the metal, but also hardens it at the same time. I then polished them up until I could see my reflection in them. I quite liked the look of them as squares with domed centres and lived with them like that for a while, but eventually decided to cut the domes out.
Here are some images of the work in progress showing the domed squares and then the cut outs:
I want to stick all the electronic components into the holes and solder them in place at the back and played around with the smallest dome today and the positioning of the components. I love the look of this and once completed the components will be splayed out a little more rather than sticking straight upwards, but I didn’t want to bend the metal pins and weaken them:
Not sure where to go from here yet, but I have a few ideas.
I managed to solder the bezel onto the base for the smallest brooch. Lots of trying with my small torch and I persevered even though I knew it wasn’t powerful enough. I relented in the end and got a bigger torch from B&Q and with that it eventually worked:
Now got to work on the bigger ones which will be more difficult.
It will be very interesting to see how this turn out. In addition to your work with the components, I think there’s something very alluring, in terms of form, about the domes with holes. It’s lovely to see someone experimenting and I like the way that you live with something for a while before going on to the next stage as this is allowing the creative process to dictate the way forward – crafting by the heart rather than by the head. I am in awe x
Thanks for the lovely comment. I’m trying to figure out whether to make them brooches or sculptures. I want brooches but finding it really hard to solder a silver bezel to a large sheet of copper – not got enough heat – so just gone to B&Q to buy a bigger torch and will try again. If that doesn’t work, they’re going to end up as sculptures I think.