What's Going on in the Classroom: Metal and Wire Projects

Hey all, just a quick peak as we finish up our metal pendants and begin wire sculptures. I posted here about the start of our metal pendents. Students used an acetylene torch and solder to connect one or more pieces of metal and did a ton of filing, sanding, and polishing to create some pretty cool pendants, here are just some of the results.

Now that most students are done with their pendant project, we are moving on to wire sculptures. Since this is a foundations course, some of these students are experiencing sculpture for the first time since elementary school. So we have a nice long talk about 3-D vs. 2-D, building an armature and then building up mass. Students had to select an animal, draw a contour line drawing of it, form an outline out of wire and then building up the mass of the sculpture using wire. These projects are in the works but here are a couple to show you how we've been starting out.

A Peak Inside my Protfolio: DIY bags and the continuation of Flight

Well, I know it's been awhile, but if you're one of my teaching friends, you know that the weeks before Christmas break are hectic. Especially at the high school level, we're busting a move to get everything ready for Scholastic's Competition. More on my student's work in a later post, however; this one is about some of the work I've been doing at home.

As some of you know, I was working on a series of paintings about flight, for my graduate painting class. You can read about the first three paintings in the series here. Since that post I have finished two more paintings. One on traditional canvas, and one on metal that I cut, sanded and riveted myself! I though it was important to immerse myself in the plane-making process to get a clear understanding of what I was depicting in my paintings. Let me tell you, riveting is hard! Here are some process pictures.

Here's the finished work, can I just say, that it's so much more powerful in person.

The piece of metal, is quite a bit different. My instructor has been pushing me to move away from technical, realistic painting. And although there is still some of that in this next piece, I do feel as if I've pushed myself. There was a lot of trial and error to get there though!

Here's the metal construction that I started with. I used sheet steel, tin snips, air compressor and rivets to put this all together.

This was my first image. And although I like it, it didn't go far enough for me.

So I thought, maybe I should add color... still not what I was looking for.

So then I sanded it down and added these shapes, which I hated. So I took it to class to get some feedback from my peers.

I just needed to refine the lines and shapes a bit more, so back to the sand paper.

Here's my finished piece. I still have some of the same lines and some color but it's more developed and I think they texture and sanded areas really bring a dimension to the piece.

Okay, okay. I know this post is going on and on, but I do have a DIY that I did this last week and some fiber art that I finally finished. That's right, the embroidered backpack is finally done. If you want to read about my long battle with the embroidery, you can read about it here. But here it is in all it's finished glory!

Of course I had to use it immediately as my purse! But I was concerned about all the various things I keep in my purse snagging on the thread on the inside. So, I just quickly made a lining panel for the front side. I also whipped up a cute little DIY pouch to keep all my junk in. I used this tutorial here and it was so super easy to follow!

Thanks for sticking with this post to the end. I love doing little projects and adding to my professional and personal portfolio with different techniques and skills. Hope you're inspired to add to yours!