Sculpting in metal

This post is the 5th in a series about my Tafe class Small Object Making. See the earlier posts here:
1. Sculpture at Tafe
2. Sculpture class - Hope pendant
3. Sculpture - rose petal bowl
4. Sculpture class - wood

Still working hard at Tafe on my material experiments, this week I was working on metal. I haven't had much experience in this area so I'm pretty excited. I found a piece of scrap aluminium and learned how to use a metal bandsaw to cut it. Aluminium is pretty soft and has a low melting point so it has to be handled pretty slowly on these tools or it starts to melt and clogs everything up. I had some fun cutting curved lines, which is a bit trickier, and then drilled some holes in it with a drill press, and filed and sanded all the sharp edges. Here's where it's at so far:

It's going to be a stem with a flower bursting from the seedpod. It's about as far away from the rose petal bowl in technique as I can get!

I'm also excited as I have a customer! Here's the new pair of shoes I'll be working on, they've requested bugs and butterflies like this pair. I love a fresh canvas just waiting for me to get to it, always makes my heart happy.

But for now, with all my extra training this week and a few evening events, I'm beat! Looking forward to sleeping in this weekend and catching up a bit. Almost there...

See the next post in this series here.