HOW I MAKE MY PIECES

I am often asked how I make my pieces.  It all starts with the idea, of course.  I am inspired by pieces I have seen in museums.  I take a lot of pictures.  And people are always requesting new pieces. 

Here are a couple of my pieces shown with the original artifacts that inspired them.
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All these ideas go onto a list.  When I have the time and attitude to start on a new piece, I look at the list and see what resonates with me.  Then I sit down with paper and pencils and try to come up with the exact image I'm going to work with.  This part can take days. (Sometimes months or years.)

Draw, cut, paste, trace, correct, trace again, and again, until it is just how I want it.
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There are a number of techniques I use to go from the finished design to the original piece. 

                              CUTWORK AND OVERLAY

Most of the pieces I do these days are cutwork and overlay.  They start out as a flat sheet of metal. 

After deciding how many layers the piece will be made of I select the gauge of metal I'm going to work with for each layer.  I make enough copies of my design to have a pattern for each layer.  These are glued directly onto the sheets of metal.  I then select the right saw blade for the gauge of metal I'm cutting, put it into my jewelers hand saw and start cutting.

Small holes have to be drilled to insert the blade through for the interior cuts.

The saw blades are very fine.  Usually a number of them are broken in the cutting process.

Once all of the pieces of metal have been cut, it is time to solder them all together.  This is a tricky stage.  After hours of painstaking cutting and filing to get each component perfect, they are carefully fluxed and positioned for soldering.  Too much heat can melt a fine piece; pieces can shift their position and end up soldered in the wrong spot; the solder can flow where it shouldn't and ruin the texture of the piece or fill in a small space in the cut work.  When everything goes right, the finished piece is now a single unit.

Because I used different metals for different layers in my raven master you can see the way the metals are layered and then soldered together to give depth to the piece.
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All that remains now is to clean and polish the piece.  This becomes the master from which a vulcanized rubber mold is made.  The mold is used to produce wax replicas of the original master.  The waxes are embedded in a special casting plaster.  The wax is then melted out, leaving a void.  This is the space into which molten melt can be cast, hence the name "lost wax casting".

The castings are removed from the plaster, trimmed, cleaned and polished.  Any pin backs that are needed are soldered on.  If the piece has stones these are set.  A final polish and the piece is ready to sell.

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                        WAX CARVING

Another technique for creating a master is to carve it.  You can really carve it out of anything.  I have done a number of pieces where I carved the master out of antler.
One of the most common materials used to carve masters is wax.  Jeweller's wax is a specially formulated hard wax that takes detail well, yet you can heat it and add to it as well.  This comes in handy if you carve off a little to much or if you want to add parts like the edging on this piece.  Here are pictures of the process.  This is my Celtic brooch or pendant.

That gives you a little idea of what is involved in creating the pieces you see on my web site. 
To see what I have for sale right now you can visit my Etsy site.
                     https://masterarks.etsy.com