Eithin » technical failure

Epoxy jewellery

Somhairle — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:59:43 +0000

Here are three of the pieces I was experimenting with at the beginning of February – I’ve been working on them on and off, coat after coat of paint and then varnish, and now they’re sitting on my desk waiting to go to their new owners. They’re all prototypes – I’m happy with the look of each of them, but there are lessons to be learned from them all too.

Pendant, 45x65mm, weighs 21g. Ultramarine swirled panel in an epoxy setting, with an antiqued bronze finish. One of the advantages of using two-part epoxy over polymer clay is that it cures at room temperature, rather than having to be heated in the oven, so I can use acrylic paints and (as here) inset rectangles of artist’s mountboard, without worrying about what that sort of heat will do to it. Next time I do one of these, I’ll drill a larger hole (or two holes) to loop cord through directly, rather than trying to bend a jump ring threaded through that thickness of solid material.

Brown & gold choker slide, 35mm square, weighs 8g. Sits a bit lower on the ribbon than it does in the picture – next time, I’ll centre the slide on the back a bit more. I actually made three others using the same paper, but didn’t clean the work area quite thoroughly enough and got flecks of epoxy on the front surface. So that’s another area to be careful with.

Aventurine & bronze choker slide, 20x30mm, weighs around 12g. Aventurine cabochon stone in an epoxy setting, with an antiqued bronze finish. I need to be a bit more careful about moulding the epoxy around the slide – this one ended up weighing a bit more than it had to, and I had to clear the slide holes with a scalpel after it had finished curing.

Printing over acrylic, pt 2

Somhairle — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:31:00 +0000

It looks like the ink transfer from the block to the paper is much more sensitive to bumps in the paper surface than it is to the permeability or otherwise – I prepared a silver-blue background the other day, on black handmade paper with quite a rough texture, and even quite a thick layer of paint didn’t smooth things out enough to get even a halfway useful ink transfer.

I did a print from my cartouche block onto it, and got very scrappy, patchy transfer – you can just about make out the design, but not much more. For comparison, I dropped a sheet of printer paper on the block afterwards, without re-inking it, and took a clear if very textured impression, so it obviously wasn’t anything to do with the amount of ink on the block or what I was doing with the baren.

When it’s dry (which will take a few more days, on an impermeable acrylic surface) I’ll scan them both for comparison.

Pentagram print, & failures

Somhairle — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:12:00 +0000

I did this last night, on some faux-parchment paper I had lying around. It’s done with Japanese carving vinyl, and I’m quite pleased with the way most of it turned out – the four styles of interlocking lines distinguish themselves nicely, and I managed to get cutlines where I wanted them and not where I didn’t. (Cutlines – the traces from clearing vinyl from the blank areas, rather than the relief outline forming the main design.)

However, I managed to do something bloody stupid, which is that I forgot completely that the design would be mirrored. Normally it doesn’t matter with my work, but this particular one completely fails to work when the pattern goes anticlockwise instead of clockwise.

Here’s a version flipped sideways in the Gimp, to show how it would have worked if it had, you know, worked at all.

I did half a dozen prints onto different papers, and learnt one other thing doing this – the flower petal inclusions in the nice handmade paper aren’t very firmly included.

Red & blue deco panel

Somhairle — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:31:00 +0000

Done using acrylic enamels on Daler board. It’s a bit messy in patches, and I hadn’t allowed sufficiently for the simultaneous globbiness and translucency of this particular kind of liquid plastic, so I count it as a technical failure overall. On the other hand, they have a lovely glowing quality, so I’m going to want to use these again.