Edgar update

Edgar made it through the night, and after giving him a little breakfast I took him to the Sonoma county bird rescue center, where he is now in very capable hands. The best part is that they got another baby crow in yesterday who is about the same age, so he'll have company while he's there. You can really see his blue eyes in this photo, and that stuff on his beak is the baby bird food I was feeding him with an eyedropper.

Edgar Allen Crow

We have lots of crows in my neighborhood, and there are several nests in trees in the neighbors yards. Little Edgar here must have fallen out and ended up in our back yard. With all the dogs and cats here it's amazing that he is unharmed. He's got feathers but can't fly yet, and the nests are too high up to put him back, so I brought him inside. He just sat in my hand and let me feed him some baby bird food that we had left over from when the budgies had babies. I was a wildlife rescue volunteer years ago so I've fed more than a few baby birds. The parents were frantically calling and flying around, but now that it's dark they've quieted down. It's heartbreaking to hear them, but I will be taking Edgar to the Sonoma County Bird Rescue Center first thing in the morning, where he will get taken care of and released.

New stuff!

Here's some of the pieces from the latest batch of etching shown on the last post.

Etch-o-rama

Art work in Adobe Illustrator ready to be printed on to PNP paper and transferred to brass sheets

The etched brass plates

This last couple of months have been crazy busy for me, but I'm finally starting to get caught up on my very long to do list. Yesterday I went wild the etching, and did plates for 5 new designs in 2 sizes each, as well as a couple of custom pet pieces. The first photo shows my illustrations, all sized and ready to print on to to the PNP transfer paper. Thanks to my spiffy "professional" clothes iron, which does not have automatic shut-off, I was able to get all my images transferred to prepared brass plates without much trouble. This used to be the worst part of the whole procedure - having an iron that shut itself off every 5 minutes made it very difficult to do the transfer process more than one at a time. I was forever waiting for the iron to heat up again. I should have some finished pieces to show in the next day or two.

What I did with my day off

Here's some pieces I made while messing around with the rough diamonds. I was experimenting with different ways of setting them, since they did change color in the kiln. The bezel is the easiest to work with I think, and the best part was when I realized that I didn't have to wait and order some tomorrow, I could just make my own! Metal clay is fun that way. Back to my regularly scheduled work now.

Rough diamonds

I've been seeing rough or raw diamonds more and more lately, so I thought I'd get some and play around a bit. I was mistakenly shipped a largish packet of small stones and the vendor told me to just keep them, so I have a bunch to experiment with. I put them in little balls of PMC3 and fired at 1110 for 30 minutes (and went out for Ethiopian food in the meantime). They survived the firing, but did darken. Which is fine for the ones that were already dark, not so good for the orange and yellow ones. I have plenty of other options for setting them though, so I'll continue to experiment. What I will eventually do with them I have no idea! That's part of the fun though.

Custom flower, start to finish

The drawing, done in Adobe Illustrator

Building the flower out of PMC. This gray thing is going to become .999 silver after firing in my kiln.

Just out of the kiln, where the organic binder has burned off and the silver particles have fused, created a pure silver flower. It's like magic, I tell you!

The finished piece, inlaid with tinted concrete



Here's a large custom piece I just finished which I photographed along the way to show the different stages of working with precious metal clay (PMC). I like to do my initial sketches on paper with a pen, but always take them in to Adobe Illustrator for my final template. Since PMC shrinks around 13%, it's very helpful to scale my drawings in Illustrator so I can get the finished size I want. The shrinkage does vary sometimes, but I can get very close to the final size I want this way. This piece is much larger than I usually work, 1 3/4" in diameter (45mm) I may have to make one for myself!