claming clams

New messages from our friends the clams

Ok, the last one does not really speak english, it's a word to word translation of the french for holy cow !  ;-)

Limits

A new work, etching again but this time acid-etching on zinc.
It's a sentence from the play Morts Sans sépulture by Jean-Paul Sartre.
I wanted to have a gash between the beginning of the sentence and the last words, I consequently had to keep the plate in the acid for quite a long time, resulting in holes in other parts of the plate.

But I find the result good, the texture and the look of the plate responds to the text and the spacing between the lines is not a problem either.

I still have to add the name of the author and I will be done with this work :-)

One is alone...

...with everything one loves.

It's NOVALIS who said that in his Fragments. I find this sentence beautiful but its shortness makes it difficult to do something with it so I worked on it in the same spirit as the previous short phrases (eg the ones from Wittgentstein, Eluard, Oscar Wilde or Rilke).

As I've been playing a lot with electro-etching lately, I decided to recycle tin boxes for this project.

To add some variety, I drew the first part of the sentence with typographic shapes, one letter per bit of metal, and wrote the second part with an italian script of the XVIth century (many thanks to my master, Keith Adams, who taught me everything I know about it).

So as to vary the textures, I ended by applying different operations to some of the metal bits like :

rust

heating

I quite like the result and I think I'll continue with electro-etching & recycling :-)

Man hole cover

Today, the first item of a serie that I hope to be numerous, a copy of a man hole cover pattern, electroetched on steel.

The cut is 3mm thick and 8cm in diameter, the perfect object to be used as a non breakable beer mat ;-)

happy new year

I didn't post a lot lately. Partly because I had no time, partly because I'm lazy and partly because I was busy creating new stuff.
To apologize, I wish you happiness, health and prosperity for this new year.
And, as for a new start, here is a how to create a wish thing with a minimum of material and by recycling daily things.

1- take a lid from a jam pot (or other lid from other pot, beans is also a good choice).

2- draw, calligraph your text, pattern, thing with a marker on the lid.

3- Remove the paint with a nail (like the one that can been seen on the bottom right of the image) or any other tool suitable.

4- Once the pattern totally clean from the paint, use a battery connected to cotton bud to electro-etch the cleaned surfaces.

5- To remove the remaining paint, you can sand the lid or, if you're as lazy as I am, just use a soldering lamp to burn the paint (beware of the fumes, probably very toxic !)

You'll have to end with a bit of sanding with a emery cloth and that's it !

Once you've taken a good pic of your etched lid, everyone will envy you :-)

And if you prefer something more traditionnal, here are Jacques Brel's wishes on January 1978.