Jewellry Class

For the last month I've been attending a City & Guilds jewellry course led by the wonderfully talented 

Adele Kime at the Glossop Adult Education Centre.

Not only is her jewellry beautiful but she's an exellent teacher too, which is just as well as I am a complete beginner when it comes to actually making anything. As I mentioned in the last post, I've made a sketchbook for the course as I'm very keen to make everything by hand. It's quite a discipline keeping a sketchbook again, it's something i got out of the habit of doing, I just dive straight into my paintings usually without much of a plan.

The first thing we're learning is etching onto brass and copper. We had to design something in black and white (I chose the drawings I've been working on lately) and then the images were photocopied onto special blue paper that's usually used for printing on circuit boards. The paper's called Press-n-peel Blue PCB Transfer Paper.

This is my original image, followed by the blue paper photocopy next to the piece of brass it's to be transfered to. I cut sections of the image to be photocopied to minimise the amount of blank space.

I put a thin sheet of paper over the brass and heated the metal with an iron (no steam), for about 4-5 minutes, then I quickly placed the blue paper, image face down, onto the brass, covered it with the paper, and heated it again with the iron for another 4-5 minutes. Then I plunged the brass, paper still attached, into a jug of cold water for a few seconds before taking it out and peeling off the paper.

Very exciting!

Not all the detail came out, the drawing of the face is very subtle, lot's of little dots, but I was happy with it. You can get a blue etch resist pcb marker pen that you can use to draw directly onto the metal with but it's not a very fine nib, so the paper allows for more detail.

This is my brass after it spent 3 hours in the Ferric Sulphate solution we made at the centre. I still have to give it a final clean. The face is so subtle you can only see it when tilted towards the light, so I intend to oxidise it to blacken the raised areas. The module of the  course i'm currently studying is all about producing samples and experimenting with different techniques.

What do you think?

Love and light xxx