Experimenting (descriptive writing)

I wanted to work with the positive and negative shapes of the leaf veins as I wanted to continue with my enamelling. I took a square piece of copper plate and rolled it so that it was about cardboard thin. I then put the copper onto my soldering block and used my soldering torch to melt small holes into the plate. It was interesting to see the copper melt and gather making blobs around the holes. The problem was that it is difficult to control how big the hole will turn out. The copper plate looked abstract once I was done melting holes so I decided to enamel it with jade green to hopefully make the holes look more like the bite marks from an insect on a leaf (Fig. 1). But after enamelling, it looked worse. The green square looked like it was a piece of mouldy cheese out of a cartoon. The square shape and the shiny finish from the enamel enhanced the look of it being artificial cheese. I couldn't get the cheese image out of my head so I scraped the idea.

Trying to salvage my idea of working with positive and negative shapes I took my leaf skeleton and photocopied it. I then increased the image of the leaf until the small fragile veins were visible. I drew over the photocopy so it was not so faded as I wanted to insert the image into Rhinocerous (our CAD program). I drew a section of the pattern on Rhino which I then printed and started piercing it out of copper which can be seen in figure 2. The pattern is so much cleaner and neater than my first method and once it is done I will decide if I am going to enamel on it or not.

Figure 2 - Rhino drawing and piercing 

Figure 1- Jade green enamel before firing