Step Twenty-One: Copper clouds

Dearest Sylwi,


Well, here we are again! :-)))) The weeks fly by so fast, sometimes it feels like I've just managed to relax from the last Tuesday's escapades, when I have to start all over again!


This week turned out a bit like last week for me. More exploring, rather than creating. Which is what makes it so hard to post. I feel like I'm posting half of an idea... and no idea what the next half would be... but, I enjoyed doing it, so I should try not to worry about the end result! I guess the process and what I learned is all that matters! :-)


This week I bought Papercraft, by R. Klanten. I think it's a brilliant book! It covers many of my favourite paper artists and introduced me to a few that I'd never heard of. I'm fascinated by all of the different techniques the artists use. It inspired me this week to play around with paper myself.


I began by cutting 6 circles of paper, placing them in a pile and then stitching them together through the centre. It made a sort of paper pom-pom. I thought I might make a few and string them together on a garland... then, I thought, hey! I wonder what that looks like in copper mesh (as you do)! :-)

Not that you can tell from the pic, but actually, I thought it looked / worked really well! :-) 


I'd also heard that copper goes a beautiful rainbow effect colour when you heat it. So, I heated the edges of the mesh over the flame of my gas cooker... and it sorrrrt of went a pretty rainbow colour... but the very edge also went a dull grey - like, I'd maybe overcooked it. :-) Anyway - I'm learning all the time here! A little bit of heat and you get some great colours (you can sort of see them in the pic above - it's really hard to take a pic of).


It's been raining hard here today, so, I decided to make a rain cloud and raindrops out of copper... using this 'pompom' technique above. Initially, I was going to make lots of different sized, little pompoms and hang them all together, to make the cloud shape... and then string raindrops made from copper sheet (and heat them, to make them pretty rainbow colours). That was the plan, but it didn't get that far! 


I ran out of the copper mesh, so will have to try the idea another time. I thought today, though, that I could try it with paper, as a test, to see if it worked or not. 


Instead of making clouds from lots of little pompoms, I thought I'd use the same technique of stacking the shapes and sewing them together through the centre, but instead of lots of circles, I cut cloud shapes.

The idea worked well with paper. I had enough copper sheet left to make raindrops, so I strung them onto my cloud. They looked pretty just as the copper colour, but I decided to go one better ...and in doing so, went one worse! :-)  ... by heating them. For some reason, when I heated them, they didn't colour at all, but just went a burnt, black colour! :-(  *sigh*


I tried to sand the black off, but the raindrops still look horribly dull. Next time, I shall have to remember to heat the metal, before I cut it into shapes. I have no idea why it didn't work - maybe the drops are too small to be able to use that technique and it only works on larger sheets of metal? Anyway. In the pic below, you can see the one raindrop that I cut from a sheet of metal that I heated (before I cut it into a drop) on the right... and the others which I cut first and then heated. Big difference! :-)

I quite like how this type of paper sculpture worked - either as 'full' clouds, hanging from inside a box... or 'half' clouds, stuck onto paper. Very versatile technique.


I wish I had more time to explore everything I learned today (and more copper to play with!) :-) ... but I don't. ha ha! :-)


And that, Dear Sylwi, is my Step 21! :-) Very bizarre, I know. I couldn't possibly have guessed that this is what I would 'create' today when I woke up! :-)


Hope you and the kids are feeling better?


Lots of love
Fi
xx


It's not really cheating if I add this on the same day, is it?! ;-) It's my wedding anniversary today, so I made this up really quickly this evening for my husband.

It's inspired by the fabulous Oded Ezer and his 'I ♥ Milton poster'.  Except his is so cool! :-) Mine's very crude and messy! I totally made life hard for myself by trying to do the heart the way I did the clouds earlier... and it only took about 15 minutes... but I'm excited. Nurturing creativity through this blog is spilling into other areas of my life. :-)


Right, I'm really going this time! No more late additions! :-)


xx