Tuesday, August 21, 2012

"Button, button!"

Metal clay excites me and I like to share information about this amazing medium with everyone I talk to.

But one of the things that makes me cringe is when someone says (after I talk about how it starts out in a clay form and ends up being metal) so you use molds to shape it?  Somehow that makes it sound like all I do is push it into a ready made shape and fire it.  So I proceed to clarify the large variety of processes used in creating a piece of metal clay jewelry.

One of those processes can be using a mold.  I show them pieces where I made the piece first out of polymer clay, cured it, and then made a silicon mold of the polymer piece to be used with the metal clay.

Of course there are times when a ready made piece (like the buttons I bought yesterday) are used to make a mold.  Those molds can be used as is but that wouldn't be very artistic (or legal.)  The artist uses that form as a starting point and creates something totally new from it.

The example here is created from a plastic button.  (Making it in metal gives it a whole different look.)







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