hares

This ones copper, a harder and more coppery metal, as one might well expect. One of the earliest metals to be worked by humans,it can just about chip stone (the pyramids were made with copper chisels) and it conducts electricity and heat well. This bit of copper sheet can claim both age and modernity, it was a copper water tank and now its a new bowl. I cut it out of an old boat water tank, one my friend Hotdog paul gave me. It was out of his uncles boat and dates from the 1940's. Quite honestly copper bowls are usually made from slightly heavier gage copper. This stuff is 0.3 mm thick its more usual to use 0.5 or 0.6  but i thouigh i'd give it a go.

As you can see its not all that deep and the edge is a bit "wambly" which i quite like.

Copper work hardens, hit it a few times and you risk it splitting or cracking, but normal softness can be restored by heating to red and quenching in water, which is the opposite to most other metals.

This is the underside showing off the hare indents and the red of a few heat treatments.  A with the Pewter this was hammered over a base of plasticine both front and back.

Here another top tip. Copper goes green over time, well it goes brown or green really. Raw new copper is pink, clean it up with vinegar and salt and a scouring pad and its really pink and sort of nice. Sadly it doesn't stay that way for long, in a very few minutes its going more golden and shiny, a day and its on its way to being brown as it reacts with the air. What i did with this bowl was to polish the hares bright, and treat the background with a highly secret patina liquid. If you don't tell anyone, i will let you in on the secret. Paint raw copper with Lidls liquid plant food and it rapidly goes green, this isn't a green paint, its really sending the copper off on a chemical reaction. I think its the ammonia salts in the liquid, other liquid plant food probably work just as well , but ive only tried his one.

There is another way of colouring copper, with heat. One can use a gas torch to paint very nice colours onto copper as it reacts with the flame and oxygen. Sadly these colours are "fugitive", they just don't last well. One can cover the surface with varnish to slow them going brown but then the metal looks, just as it is, covered in plastic and nasty to touch. My experiments continue with "renaissance wax" but in the end the browning is, i think, inevitable. If you fancy having a go and "flame painting" i've found the copper colours better if its left a little after cleaning i think to have a little bit of corrosion on the surface and as on this bowl, playing the flame and drawing back seems to get  some nice reds.

I did find some American site offering the secret of "flame painting" but the sample vid seems to entail Oxy acetylene torches (which i don't have) and money (ditto)....
i suspect they encase the thing in some horrid plastic coating too...