Work reviews

1)I like this enamel for I took a failed attempt and changed it into something nice the colours work well together and I feel it has a nice depth to it.

2) this one was another failed attempt for I fount it tricky to get the hang of applying the enamel but once again I feel that the result although not what I wanted came out quite well.

3) In this one I tried mixing the powdered enamel with the liquid while adding a more solid design. This one came out well but I would have possibly liked to get some more solid design aspects and more depth to the design.

4) In this one I used transparent enamel on top of a imprinted piece of copper. I was going for a fire effect and fell that I achieved this quite well.

5)This last one was were I decided to try the wet enamel and aim for a nicer finish. The end result was pretty much spot on what I was aiming for but it did come out a lot darker than i was aiming for.

1) In this one I attempted to draw on a design with sharpie. It came out reasonably well but i was unable to get any real detail with the pen.

2) this one was a mix of both the sharpie and the print so that i could see the difference and I found that the sharpie was often more dramatic were as the print was more precise.

3) in this one I once again used sharpie but rather than just drawing straight on I attempted to layer on the sharpie to see if it would affect the shade/contrast in the metal. It worked really well and helped give a good amount of depth to the piece and I would like to use this in another piece at some other time.

4) This one was just using the print I used this print for once again I wanted to see if i could play with the shade of the metal for this print had some fading parts to it and once again the sharpie was more dramatic but the print was more precise.

5) For this metal I used a print of my own design from a sketch I had done in my sketchbook. This one came out really well and I would like to use this design in my finished product and possibly other pieces of work.

1) I found that this patina just made the metal way too dark and you couldn't really get the detail i was looking for.

2)In this one I wanted to try using the lighter patinas contrasting with the darker but I found the light white was the only patina I could get to go bright and all others were just dark and looked the same.

3) This was the only patina I actually liked I managed to mix in the white as a foreground and then that sort of made the patinas behind appear to be brighter unlike all the others were they just looked dark and boring.

4) This was another attempt at making a more detailed pattern but once again it just came out as sort of a dark mess. I cannot see my self ever really using patinas in any other projects

1) For this finished brooch I used a copper rod then curved it into a circle and soldered. I was really happy with the solder for it was very accurate and the circle was about as perfect as I could get it. for the back I used a two part pin with the wire being soldered with hard solder and the extra parts being made with easy and very easy solder. I used a piece of fused glass that I had made for the past unit as my object for this brooch but unfortunately as I was making the brooch I dropped the glass and broke it. On one hand I would have like to see the brooch with a full glass piece but I also like the effect the negative space brings to the brooch. I tried to follow the colour scheme with the glass and copper all the way through both my brooches with the main colours being red yellow and orange.

2) For my second main brooch I used enamel with a spiral design for the centre once again using the yellow red and orange colour scheme for this brooch. I tried to fill the gap my other brooch had and instead of making this one minimalist I decided to add complex wire wrappings around the edge of the brooch which was soldered using enamelling solder in order to let it hold onto the back. I feel that I followed my viking theme quite well and my use of patinas on both of the pieces help give the aged effect that I was looking for when designing my pieces.

With all of my mug designs the textured surface I had came out quite well. although once glazed were not quite as prominent as I would have liked. With a few mugs I had found issues with the glazing which caused my to re-glaze this meant that a few of the mugs were very hit or miss with a few coming out quite well and others coming out with a not very nice greeny brown colour on them which I did not like. I did have one mug were I had mixed the glazes and let it drip down the sides and this one came out extremely well and is a design I would like to recreate later on possibly after these rotations but maybe next time rather than leaving the lower half plane I would add a transparent glaze over the lower half and i feel this would make the mug look much more professional. One thing I did not account enough for was the mug handle shrinkage. Although I did allow for a 20% reduction in size I did not account for the warping to the handle meaning that the handle had curved down and filled in the gap I had added making the handle uncomfortable and making it impossible to hang it as I had first intended.

For my finished glass piece I kept the finish on it somewhat crude by not taking it up to a high polish I felt that this was the best way to go for it matches the essance of my creature as well as it would mean I didnt have to worry about scratches quite as much when mounting it in its stand. I really like the stand and i feel that it shows the enviroment and ties back to the creature design very well. Maybe if I were to do this again I would possibly add some extra details to the metal box portion but I was running out of time and found my self unable to add any extra emements.

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