Well I suppose if you're still here with me you deserve a treat. Here's a sequence of images, in reverse order because I'm too tired to redo them now, of some trials I made to work out the effect I was after with my dragonfly wings. The image above shows the final version but this is not one of the wings I'll actually be setting in the stone. Those ones are under way now and will hopefully be a little more delicate, and tidy. Practice, practice, practice. Oh...my son, Kyle, wants to apologise for his bitten nail, those are his fingers,he's quite embarrassed about it but his are so much more youthful looking than mine ;-)
The effect you see here is what I was after and this will be what the wings on the finished piece will look like. It's perched on a section of the iron patina I'm toying with at this point also, not sure yet......and don't bother asking me how I went about this, because I'm not telling...go figure out your own madness.
This is a brooch I made to see if my idea of cutting metal away behind the mother of pearl wing would have any effect. I think it does, it really glows when light gets behind the piece. With the gods on my side the effect on the stone will be what I imagine. I've even been thinking about having some fibre optics in the back of the stone to give the wings an " inner glow".
The silver wing is rendered in nunome-zogan and was just another little test of an idea. I think it has interesting possibilities. The body of the brooch is iron, of course.
This was the first version, and is awful, I think. I engraved the pattern into the mother of pearl, using a hand pushed scorper, then filled the lines with black urushi and polished level. It seemed a logical approach to trying to capture the feeling of the wings.The end result looks far too hard, and harsh. The actual engraving was a shambles too, which didn't help. The effect of the lacquer was to make it look like a cheap printed design. I had to also figure out an effective way of transferring the pattern onto the shell. The solution was actually obvious, and was used a great deal in the Renaissance. Well....you didn't expect me to give that secret away too... did you? ;-)
p.s, you did get it...didn't you? My clever play on the use of the word light in the title...
6 comments:
Finally i had an idea of the scale of your new work.. subarashii
Very delicate work, Ford. the interaction between the iron surface and the MoP results a fossil- like appearance...
Karl :)
Karl you just gave me an idea.. one day if i will be able to do that i will try to make an insect in metal and include it inside some resin to emulate those ambers with insect ;)
All of the lines are far too uniform. Additionally, there are anatomical errors. Keep on trying, better luck next time!
hi Anonymous,
if you'd been following my exploration of this subject you'd have realised that anatomical accuracy was never my intention. I spent 3 days trying to abstract the " effect" of the veins in the wings.
Luck has little to do with it really, and in addition...what I'm showing you here is so much bigger than reality ( I thought that was obvious ). Evidently the final, real world, effect is actually undermined, by my attempts to "illuminate". In the hand this degree of details is already getting to the limit of what the naked eye can make sense of.
Come to think of it, I'm probably diluting a lot of what I do by trying to "reveal all", so to speak.
Thanks for he comment though, and I'll make sure the thicker, structural lines, are a little bolder on the wings I'm doing now. These ones are all trials anyway.
What I was planning was to do all the veins as fine as possible first, and then with them actually in place, work on making the main lines a little more strong so as to help create the sense of structure that characterises these types of wings.
Namaste.
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