Art Jewelry Boot Camp: Textured Metal Challenge

Welcome to our second Art Jewelry Boot Camp challenge of 2013.....Textured Metal!

For the next few weeks, we will be sharing innovative, inexpensive ways to texture metal by hand. There are plenty of wonderful options in a fully equipped metals studio for texturing metal and plenty of neat products out on the jewelry craft market these days for achieving wonderful textures and patterns, but we want to see what you can do with what you have!

Today, I'm sharing a video about different textures I've achieved with simple household materials...and some tips for getting you started on your texture journey!






HIGHLIGHTS/TIPS from the video:

*If you have "nice" hammers, keep them separate, so in your creativity, you don't use your good hammer for hammering, let's say a piece of wire or a steel screw!

*Keep your eye out in thrift stores and discount stores for items that will make interesting textures! Old hammers, screwdrivers, and other steel bits like steel window screen will fuel your creativity!!!! By that same token, don't use household tools that you would like to use again for their intended purpose! You (or your significant other!) will be really sore that you messed up a screwdriver to make texture next time you need it for a household task....

*Anneal your metal with a torch so it's nice and soft to receive the texture.

* Use an old bench block or anvil when texturing or hammering. After lots of texturing, your block or anvil will become dented and rendered a bit more useless if you need it for finer applications. I FLIP mine! One side is nice and smooth and shiny and the other is a bit pitted and dented from repeated texturing.


Our next Art Jewelry Boot Camp hop will be on April 8th! LET'S GET TO WORK, RECRUITS!!!! Remember to upload your lovelies to our Flickr group and remember to check out the rules if you haven't done so.


Remember, this challenge is about texturing by HAND. For the purposes of this challenge, we DO NOT want work textured by the following:

*Etching
*Sandblasting
*Rolling Mill
*Alphabet/symbol Stamping (unless you are using it in an innovative way to make fabulous texture)
* Textures from craft embossing machines

All these have their place and may be in a FUTURE challenge, they're just not for THIS challenge. :) Thanks!