How About Some Metalwork For a Change?

I really need to quit making a habit of only posting ever three weeks. Such is life, I suppose. However, this blog post will serve to demonstrate what the hell I've been doing with my time since the last post!

As some of you may know, I enrolled in a metalworking class this semester. It's been hard work, but having the weight of a finished piece in my hand is very rewarding. I have enjoyed it so much that I've actually signed up for a 1 hour credit next semester so that I can continue to use the studio for some things I have planned. That will come later, though.

This week, I thought it fitting to show off my (mostly) finished hollow construction piece. The term 'hollow' denoted that it was crafted by creating a box like structure with a top, bottom and walls and soldering the entire piece together. I say mostly finished due to the fact that these pictures were taken before I had completed the sanding process, so there are still quite a few imperfections that can be seen in it. Without further a due, here it is:

Pretty sweet, eh? It's a ring, but during the design process, we were told not to think of it as a piece of jewelry but instead as a 'stie-specific sculpture.' I created it to have a hole for three fingers to prevent any tipping. The top part you see here is made of brass while the walls and back were made of copper. All and all, it turned out pretty nice. Sure, there was a little half centimeter stretch where I couldn't get the seam to solder, but I still consider the whole thing a success.

Seriously, though, I'm pretty sure I put a good 40-50 hours into this. If I had managed my time a bit better, I probably could have gotten it perfect, but that's a dangerous path of thought to begin down, so I'll just love it the way it is.

While I'm on the topic of my metalworking, I suppose I could go ahead and post the first two project that we did before this one. I warn you, though, the pictures are not too great.

This was our first project, the layer project. We were to design a minimum three layer piece using three 2x2" pieces of brass, copper and nickel. The design was based off of a set of 'evolutions' we based off of magazine tracings. I believe my original image was of a really interesting interior arch way. Everything was done using cold connections (i.e. no soldering, only rivets). The picture is pretty washed out, but I took it while the piece was actually in the display case at Ellis Hall. I could probably take another since it's back in my possession now, but I need to clean off some finger print gunk that's on it first.

An the simple ring project. The initial designs were a bit more complicated, but, for those who don't know, sterling silver is expensive. And I'm not even talking about fine silver here. I think this tiny design ended up costing me a little over $7 in material and a good 25 hours of work to construct it. She told me what the stone is, but I don't remember. I went with the blue one because it was the perdiest of the stones I had... Though, given my love of Slytherin House, it was a close race between this stone and the green one I had.

Welp, that's all I've got for now. I would say that once I take better pictures I'll post them, but then I'd have to go through and edit the whole damn post and take out all the comments about the horrible pictures and unfinished work. So, when I get around to taking better pictures, I'll put them on Deviantart and post a link here, that cool?

Until next time!

Two Posts in One Day? What is Going On?!

Very brief post, mainly to show off my first completed design project. The project is known as the 'Black Square Problem' and apparently is a project all design majors will encounter. We were given 6 adjectives and required to create a picture that would convey that adjective or emotion by using only 4 black squares. I actually posted the initial designs on Facebook to gauge how accurate I was and only ended up changing one at the advice of my instructor.

I'll go ahead an post the image first if you would like to take a guess, but don't scroll to far because the adjectives and reasoning are listed below.

It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I reworked one design, tweaked another and ended up having to completely redo three of them because they had glue spots on them. The adjective are shown left to right, top to bottom as follows:

Ordered
This one is relatively easy to convey. The first design was just four equal boxes forming a larger box shape. Then, I moved on to something that looked like the Purina logo. However, after reading a few of the synonyms for this word, I went with the design you see because it shows motion. It's almost as if they are coming off of an assembly line, all the same and orderly.

Increase
This one was the one the instructor suggested changing, mainly due to the other mostly black design that was the odd man out. The first design started with a small square in the bottom left hand corner. The other three became larger and larger as they moved up to the top right in an arc resembling a parabola. His words were that we were going to see a lot of similar designs and that I should try to use the negative space to show the word. I kind of cheated because I had no idea what to do. By cheating I mean that I googled the word 'increase' and looked at the image results. I saw a whole bunch of arrows and that is when the design you see now came to me.

Bold
This one gave me the most trouble. At first I wanted to use a large square next to a small one, but that didn't quite do it for me. This design was initially an idea for Increase, but when Josh said it made him think of 'adventure' I started thinking about it in a different way. Some people see it as tumbling or falling down a hill, but the bouncing motion created is supposed to convey boldly charging forward  and up the hill. The split responses I got on this one actually told me a bit about the person depending on which direction the squares were traveling to them... A lot more people on my Facebook are pessimists than I thought.

Congestion
Meh, I'm still not really pleased with this one. The synonyms made me think of crowding and tried to cram them into a small space. The angle was meant to make it feel more off kilter than if I had just put the square edges parallel to the frame edges. I don't know, could have been better.

Tension
This one gave me trouble at first, but as soon as I sketched this idea down, I knew it was the one. Tension can be seen a couple different ways. While many of my classmates were viewing it as the physical tension like you would see in a rope, I immediately went to the emotion behind the word. Tension is very negative and I associate many synonymous feelings with it like stress, anxiety, pressure, depression, etc. So, it's meant to be seen as the serene calm of the dark being cracked harshly causing a sort of sting that could be perceived as large or small..

Playful
I got a lot of really good synonyms on this one. Words like bouncy, floating, fun, and others were used by my friends on Facebook. These are all positive and upbeat feelings I wanted associated when looking at this design.

There you have it, finished design project numero uno. It gave me small fits of grief throughout the process, but over all it was pretty fun. Our next project is going to be about balance, but for now, I must study for our design quiz tomorrow. Thanks for checking in!