cupcake 3 the finish

I got er done! came out great. Went thru the various finishing steps of sanding , greystone (tripoli) and zam using brushes, hard felt and moslem buffs. The color in these photos is a little odd. The piece is all one color of gold. The reflections and textures make it look tri color.

cupcake3

Here it is with the all the stones set and ready to finish. I had to make a couple of tools to accomplish it but that's half the fun!

cupcake2

I set the first stone, which was the biggest, in the base of the bail. All the stones will be flush mounted
This is how the rough casting looked after I did a little prefinishing. the wholes are predrilled in the wax and cast in the gold to save time and effort when setting. I had to do a fair amount of wax work because the customer had teh holes fro the stones too close together.

cupcake 1

Hi
I thought it might be interesting to the customer and other potential customers and students of my classes and other friends and random art followers to see what the process is about. After all, the process is what's it's all about for the artist at least it is for me. Of course I want to see a good outcome. Have something to be proud of when it's all done but the doing it the important part. Figuring out the solutions, applying the tools, working out the order of steps, that's the fun part for me. It's also the interesting part of other peoples work for me too. I always want to know "how did you do that".? What lead me to start this blog is the most recent project which is a gold pendant carved in wax by the customer. It's to be cast using the customers gold and set with his stones. I thought of this after I cast the piece so I don't have a picture of the wax but I will take a picture of the semi finished piece before I start to set the stones .
I'll also try to keep track of painting in progress and post them here also. I'm generally a studio painter because I paint at night and in the early morning but I should be able to keep track of the paintings in progress. ( if I remember to photo them). I don't have much time for this so these posts might have lots of spelling and grammar errors. I apologize in advance. Please don't judge me too harshly by this blog