Week 6-Applied Arts

On our first day in applied arts we only had the afternoon to do some work as we had spent the morning in talks with ex-students at the college. We spent the afternoon drawing images to help design objects. We started off by having objects in front of us then making a view finder. We then placed the view finder onto the object and drew a line drawing of what we could see. We then drew in the same box but a different part of the object, to create some interesting shapes. We were then asked to pick an interesting shape and design something using that shape, whether it be some jewellery or another object.
I decided to design some jewellery.

On our second day we were in the workshop all day. Our task was to cover a wooden cube in metal that we had manipulated using the processes that were available to us in the workshop. These processes were:

• Rolling Mill-used to stretch metal, flatten it out more and can also add pattern.
• Fly Press-embosses metal by adding lots of pressure, requires plates of metal and rubber to withstand pressure. Wire is used to add patterns in metal.
• Foot Guillitine-used to cut metal
• Annealing Room-Using heat to make metal a dark cherry red, when it is added to acid and washed this gets rid of the colour but means that metal is more maluable.
• Pillar Drill-drills holes in metal.
• Using a hammer and different shaped chisels to add marks to metal
• Small Gas Torch-changes colour of metal by adding heat. Creates a look of oil in water.

I used all of the proccesses available except the Annealing room, the Drill and the Rolling Mill, just because it preffered the other processes more and liked the effects these created.

I enjoyed this week more than i thought i would. I had never worked in metal before i took part in the applied arts week and i thought working with it was interesting and also thought learning about all the processes was interesting too.