More Metal, and "Etching" the Easy Way

When I was at CREATE this past summer I was lucky enough to take a wonderful class with Leighanna Light.  Click here to see what we did.  She had some samples of other projects with her, and one was for goddesses that really caught my eye.  So I was happy to take Faux Etching for the Folk Goddess at Art Is You.  I just love using bits and pieces of metal to create these unique wall hangings.  I'm especially fond of the one that uses a nicely aged Altoids tin as the goddess's body.

This is the very beginning of construction.  I was trying out different things for my first goddess.  Those legs are typewriter keys. 

 

 

The look of etched metal you see on the tin is the faux in the class title.  It couldn't be easier.  We stamped on the already darkened tin (torched, or, as Leighanna informed us, placed on the barbecue) with matte medium, and then coated the whole thing with a liquid patina.  It starts out black, but within a few days it was rusty.  You'll see that in a bit.  In the photo above you can just see the rusting in its early stages.  Once it got to the point I liked, I sealed everything I'd patinaed with a metal sealant.  Otherwise, it would just keep rusting until eventually it would fall apart.

 

 

This is a piece of metal that has the technique, waiting to be used on the next goddess.

 

 

Here are my two pieces right after construction.  One used the tin as the body; the other used flat pieces of metal.

 

 

 

And here they are at home, after some additional rusting and a coating of sealant.

 

 

Leighanna provided the faces and the metal for the bodies, and the set of typewriter keys.  We brought an assortment of charms, beads, metal scraps, etc. to finish our pieces.  The hat above is actually a leftover part from the sconce I used in Michael DeMeng's class.  If you take a close look at all the goddesses I think you'll recognize plenty of stuff you'd find in your own junk pile.







 

 

What follows:  Leighanna snapping photos of our creations, and then, the class goddesses (some finished, some still works in progress).

 

 

 

 

And how about this one; not a goddess at all, but a pup!

 

 

 

The organizers of Art Is You are actually accepting early registration for next year (no classes announced, just reserving a spot for the event), and you better believe I'm in!  If you only have the time and resources to attend one such retreat next year, my advice is to go with Art Is You.  And you have plenty of time to start saving.  It's truly a class organization.

 













DeLighted, DeLirious, and Totally DeMengled

 



Just in case you don't know, Michael DeMeng is an extraordinary assemblage artist.  As I found out at Art Is You, he is also a wonderful teacher.  Michael's specialty is taking found objects and transforming them into true works of art.  His style is quirky (some say a bit creepy), not for everyone, but I am a big fan. The people in the class I took (great title: Patron Saint of Discarded Things), came in with buckets full of metal, wood, plastic, dolls, toys, gears, wheels.  Get the picture?

Michael helped each of us figure out how to put our modge podge of materials together, and his paint recipes turned our piles of junk into cohesive pieces. 

Here are some of Michael's pieces, on display in the front of our room:



I worked smaller than most people because a) there is always the possibility that I'll be traveling by train and b) I have limited space to display stuff in my apartment.  My base materials were a rusty old sconce, a plastic skull, and a small piece of wood.  Here is my piece in the process of being assembled:

 

The coils wrapped around the body of the sconce are made of epoxy clay, and it not only provides some texture, it is a great adhesive.  There is some on the top of the skull to hold the crown of pen nibs in place.

 

And here is the piece after about a gazillion layers of paint:

 

 

 

And yes, that is a tiny skull lurking behind the larger one.  And yes, again, he is wearing a beanie.  Doesn't everything, even the plastic, look like rusty crusty metal?

 

Although everyone was really absorbed in their work, I found this to be a particularly friendly and generous group of people.  We all brought so much, and only used a fraction of that, so sharing of supplies went on all day long.

 



 

Before we left, we put all our pieces on a table in the hallway and spent a good amount of time discussing each one, and that was a very valuable part of the class.  We learned how everyone else put their pieces together and how we used our paints and other materials to transform them.  Not all of the pieces are finished (you'll see one with parts temporarily held together with masking tape), but I think you can appreciate the amount of work that went into each one.

 

 

 

I would take another class with Michael in a heartbeat.