Friday 18 September 2015

Our Creative Space...


For years we have collected all kind of oddities from the beach. While our focus is on sea urchins we have accumulated a lot of other things like a nice amount of crab claws and bodies.


And starfishes. Both of these finds are fragile, so we never really used much of them.
We tried to cast them in resin but somehow resin never really worked out for us.


For ages we thought of electroforming and investigated the materials and method, we bought some tutorials about them and finally made the investment. As the electronics came for the US and the chemicals from the UK it took a while to get them.


The pieces first needed to be coated in several layers of lacquer and then in graphite paint which is an electric conductive paint.


And then each piece was electroformed one by one connecting both the anode and the piece to electricity, copper goes off the anode and attaches itself to the piece.


Even though you see that it gets a layer of copper pretty quickly, a nice solid layer can take a while, these all took around 30 hours each to make them suitable to wear.


After that they got patina'ed with liver of sulver for a nice dark finish. I high lighted the texture with a metal brush, as it was entirely black at first.
And here finally after months of preps, the first electroformed pieces, we will also make silver ones soon!


I will be slowly listing them today in our StaroftheEast shop, and we'll continue to experiment with more beach found oddities :)


11 comments:

  1. I saw these on IG and they are amazing! Utterly in love!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Amazing beach finds! Love, love, love!

    ReplyDelete
  3. What a huge amount of wonderful beach finds. I didn't know about this method, it has a great result. I can see another signature line of product coming up.

    ReplyDelete
  4. So cool, I like the electroforming, makes me feel like a mad scientist :-)
    And your finds are really suitable for this process I think. Seeing the amount of things in your boxes you'll have fun for quite some time!

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is so cool! Amazing amount of work but totally worth it! It's so cool that you find new waysof expressing yourself every day!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Wow! They look amazing! As far as i can understand, they do require a lot of work, but the result is really stunning! :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. These are lovely! It's great how you explain the process too! I used electrolysis before, only not to add metal to pieces, but to remove rust from vintage keys in a non-distructive way - my bf made the necessary equipment and everything with what we had around the house. About the silver coating, can you do it directly with silver or does it has to have a copper layer first - I bought an electroforned leaf of Etsy and while it said it was silver, it actually had a tiny amount of silver on the surface, and copper inside.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, indeed copper has to be done first after that silver or even gold can be done, which is just a thin layer as the material is much more expensive than copper, but that leaf you mention seems to have a little too little silver on it.

      Delete
    2. I see, very interesting! Thanks for the info!
      If someone would hand me materials, I don't think I'd ever stop, I would electroform all the objects in my house :) seems like a lot of fun!

      Delete
  8. Interesting to join creativity and science! Must have been interesting to see them "grow" in the bath. And the finished pieces look awesome as always!

    ReplyDelete
  9. I love the process. It must be really cool to make. The result is wayyyy too gothic for me now though a few years back.... ;)

    ReplyDelete