Layers

The first two layers of the apple's core are now fixed to the brass mainshaft of the weathervane. There is still quite a lot of work to be done, like filling the large gap which can be seen down the left side. Once closed however, the copper parts should assemble quite quickly...all in time for Art in Action in 10 days time? So much to do! 
The weekend was a frenzy of activity, moving the office into it's new space. Went to hear Finn Mackay at the Globe in Hay-on-Wye, and then visited painter James Ursell at his new studio/home in the Golden Valley with it's sweeping views over the Black Mountains.

We are still working hard planning our metalsmithing courses for the fall. In anticipation we are finishing insulating the studio &  rendering walls. Bits of of plaster and dust keep showering down on me today as "Gordon & son" get cracking on the upstairs. This evening we have a big packing job, as the Montagu's Harrier Hawk is back from the museum and off to it's new home. The Trotting Horse will follow on Thursday. 

Working on the Core

The apple weathervane is chugging along! The "body" is now primarily smoothed, although it is never easy to know when to stop and just be happy. The two halves of the large three-dimensional leaf are brazed together with a "rough" edging, giving the leaf a ragged, chunky outline. The leaf has been designed to be smooth and rounded on one side (the side depicting the core of the apple) and deeply veined on the side with the whole apple, creating a striking contrast between the two sides.
 All our attention is now geared toward the apple's core, and trying to get the chisel detail of each layer to emanate it's own character. The first layer is being developed with a ball-pean "ding" pattern which should shimmer in the light. This seemed to be a nice reference to the inside of the apple being white. The ball-peaning stretches the copper, causing it to curl (which can be seen in the picture). This will be flattened out once the texturing is complete.

We have never made an fruit-themed weathervane before, so it was very strange today to receive an enquiry for the (possible) commission of an apple and pear! As I sat hammering I started to imagine making a giant strawberry, which led of course to thinking of one of my very favourite children's books James and the Giant Peach...Roald Dahl is brilliant!

An Apple

The studio is currently working on two new weathervanes, with a big push last week to get both sketches enlarged & finalized as full scale drawings. Great for the current apprentice to see the whole process from concept-to-copper.

The extra-large apple weathervane should be fun, as the idea is to have one side of the vane showing a "whole" apple, and the other side showing a "half" apple. We have been looking at retro apple patterns to come up with a "punchy", layered design for the apple's core. It's amazing how much character the inside of an apple can have! Because the design is large, the focus on achieving robust volume from the "whole" apple has meant some very aggressive, prolonged blows with a ball-pean hammer (I have the blisters to prove it).The result is a rounded & deeply dimpled shape. Creating this shape required two full annealings (and two spot annealings) to soften the copper and coax it into shape. The surface will now be smoothed over the course of the next few days using synthetic mallets. Creating the layers on the opposite side will be interesting, as each layer will need to be braced to the mainshaft and reinforced for strength. Hopefully the two little seeds will appear like gems suspended within these layers. It all proves some of the simplest ideas can be the most challenging!

Making Talons

I have been working on a large Montagu's Harrier Hawk. Most of today was spent making legs and talons. The legs are bronzed copper, and the talons are forged brass. Brazing the different metals together can be very frustrating, as each metal behaves differently under heat. In  the simplest terms, brass is brittle and bronze is elastic. More importantly, when too hot neither the brass or bronze will accept the brazing rod. It's like coaxing a stubborn child. If you linger too long, the brass crawls back on itself like curdled milk, whereas the surface of the bronze gets a sort of glazed skin whilst underneath the metal is actually so mushy it usually slumps with the weight of itself.
As the Montagu's is now nearly done, I have left a small hole in the head of the bird, for adding  weight for ballast. The talons and legs still need some fine tuning, and the wings and tail need edging, but it's very close. This stage of construction is a bit of a marathon, with the torches constantly on, and a lot of upside-down brazing and strange, difficult crevices to get the tip of the torch into. Knocking off at 4pm is an absolute necessity when the work gets this intense. So, we have taken to letting the pigs out for a run in the big field every afternoon. They absolutely love the open space  & are terribly funny to watch running full pelt with their ears flopping and legs kicked out. Well, funny for us...the sheep aren't of the same opinion. I am sure Trixie (who is the trickster of the three) chases them for the thrill, she even chased the cat today. She has the disconcerting habit of trying to up-end you. The cows find it all a fine distraction from grazing, and  come crowding to the fence to enjoy the show. The pheasant and his harem just find it annoying.

Someone mentioned farmers using pigs to herd sheep. Is that possible?

Pair of Blackbirds

We are working on a pair of blackbirds as a weathervane, as well as a goose in flight. Whilst the blackbirds are a totally bespoke design, the goose is numbered 5 in the series. I really like the goose, and have used it on the homepage of our current website, as well as having had postcards printed, and included it in the brochure. The first goose had a shorter neck and longer beak and sold from Cirencester market (8 years ago?). The the second one (with the beautiful long neck) sold to a diamond heir. Number three, well I would have to look in my files, but number  four found a semi-local home a few years back on a gorgeous garage with a bell tower. The Astin Martin convertible in the garage was pretty beautiful, too!

The realisation of every design begins with a full scale drawing. Below is a detail of the blackbird design, and next to the drawing is a big pile of (annealed) copper patterns ready to shape.



This is a tricky design, as the upper bird with it's wings outstretched is not facing into the wind. I have never seen or made a weathervane of a bird in flight with it's back to the wind...risky business! The ultimate reward will be if it's possible to do without reinforcing the edge of the feathers.

Three Banners for Scotland

We seem to be having a run of Scottish commissions; this time a repeated design from the portfolio. The five original banner weathervanes  were completed when the studio was still on Dartmoor, back in 2004. These three new recruits have been commissioned to join the five, as the restoration project on the building is now finally complete. Eight weathervanes on eight turrets...very grand!

The banners represent the Scottish flag and included quite a number of small pieces to be assembled, including spun copper balls, rivets and brass rings. I love when the worktable looks this busy.

Once assembled and cleaned, they were left out on a glorious day, to dry & then into our "clean" studio for a gilding session.

Gordon decided to do a vane a day, which meant preparing the surface the night before, and then gilding for around five hours the next morning. Three full days of gilding...not the funnest weekend, but certainly a productive one!

The end of a project

At the end of every project, the weather becomes of critical importance. After weeks on the studio workbench, a night in the bath, and a morning being scrubbed and waxed, the weathervane goes out to face the day... This is less about checking that it works (of course it works!) and more about getting a good picture. And you usually only get one chance to get it right. You need sun, and little or no wind, interesting clouds and a sense of horizon. I can tell you it isn't very often we are so lucky. The snapshot above was taken, lying flat on my stomach in a sodden field, just as the last of the days sun had disappeared over Stockley Hill. Dare I mention that  this was taken at the end of a 48 hour gilding marathon; "tired" doesn't begin to cover how I felt.

For the official portfolio picture, you will have to visit our webpage heraldic ship weathervane .

This weathervane forms part of a larger project, including a mechanism which turns an internal dial in the house. The client requested the style of this dial be inspired by & reflect the fluid lines

of their bespoke wrought iron staircase by Paul Hodgkiss. Unfortunately the staircase did not exist yet (well conceptually it did, but not actually on paper). We proposed around a dozen random ideas mostly rough sketches. The "chosen one" wasn't much more than a scribble on the back of a scrap envelope...

We wanted to keep the feeling of it being "quick" & "light"...a sketch in copper. I wonder if the gold will give it a feeling of density.

Here it is before cleaning, measuring about 600mm in length.

We did still manage to have Thanksgiving, although only a small one, in amongst this project...I even finished Hound of the Baskervilles. Having lived a mile outside Princetown and on the road to the Grimpen Mire (or the Foxtor Mire as it is actually named), it was quite rivetting to read! Now I am quite geared up to read the Great Gatsby, and perhaps after ....the Grapes of Wrath? We watched the most amazing documentary on Steinbeck. British television has such an interesting angle on American culture. It is quite enlightening to see my country from another point of view. I have given up on ever explaining Thanksgiving though!

Boats as Weathervanes

I have worked on a fair few boats in my days as a weathervane maker. Boats are the second most popular theme amongst historic 3D vanes in England, so there is plenty of inspiration pieces. Usually it is the ornate detail, the rigging & abundance of sail that makes a showstopping boat, and usually it helps if the design is based on a famous and beautiful ship in the first place! 

But ornate design has some drawbacks. Rigging, whilst elegant & beautiful, is also the most likely to show stress over time.  In the case of this client's Swan 431, the whole design was simplified:  a wedge shaped hull, stainless steel sleeving through the whole length of the mast, heavier guage copper for the sails and a few hardy stays. A ship pared back to only the most necessary aesthetic elements, all to prepare it for a life fighting the wicked winds of the Florida keys...

The boat currently on the workbench  will face similar weather, being destined for one of the islands in the Inner Hebrides in Scotland . Here are some snaps of the design being developed. The final image shows the "lymphad" with a red undercoat, in preparation for full gilding.

Ship Shape & Diggers in the Garden

The Sun & Moon weathervane is off to it's new home. We ended up gilding the sun unlike the original weathervane  which was bronzed. The bronze does give a beautiful molten texture, but because this was a larger version, the additional weight at the tail end of the weathervane would have put too much stress on the pivot point.

Work in the studio has been completely focused on the Hebridian lymphad. I don't know why stylized designs end up being so challenging. Perhaps because they rely entirely on the purity of line, something quite hard to maintain with the copper moving all over the place! Elements like the robust hull, and the "straps" that wrap around it, as well as spun copper ball pierced by the arrow, forged brass, and the date in the tail...these are not easy to create. The high heat of the oxy-acetylene seems to "hot box" the brass and exhaust the more delicate copper detail, so warpage becomes a major issue. It is a lovely "fat" weathervane to behold though...so it's all worth it in the end.

I'll post a picture of the weathervane again once it's gilded, but the best I can do now is a silhouette, as our November weather has deteriorated in to dark, wet days:

And for those of you that may have driven by the house and stared in horror at the "bomb site" that is Woodfield Farm, lots has been going on. The scaffolding is still up, but the paint job is finally done (using eco paints). The new orchard isn't planted yet, but the chestnut tree surrounds are in.

However, by far the biggest shock is the removal of the leylandii hedge. Not only is it strange to see all the way down to the road from our kitchen window, but the green grass of the farmer's field is in shreds with all the work. The uninterrupted space is all a bit overwhelming! At least the machinery is marvellous to look at.

Life after Liberty

Looking through old pictures and found this moody one of our running horse. The colours on the copper are amazing!

March was a crazy month for the studio. We opened our first fine art exhibition at the Courtyard, we delivered a monumental 8ft. tall weathervane (Lady Liberty) to the new Folk Art Gallery at the American Museum in Britain & we met Prince Charles (visited the house & studio).

We also bought a gypsy caravan (check out Jeanne Bayol's book Les Roulottes). March madness?

Finished the red tail kite commission, and straight on to an elegant duck.

 Lots of enquiries from Saturdays article in the Daily Telegraph. The hare was a big hit!
Nice quote too: "For the ultimate weathervane look no further than Greens Weathervanes"