Question About Nunome-Zougan

[Elisa]

Hi Fred and Thomas,

 

It's nice to read your massages. Thank you Fred for your wishes!! I was able to read them in time, during the course days.

Sorry, I wasn't able to replay earlyer. This moth have been so full of things and I'm still in a rush, just one week more and I can relax.

I would be glad to tell you about the experience, I have also some picture to show you. I will be back soon, after the first week-end of October.

 

A presto!!

Elisa

[Fred E. Zweig]

Elisa,

 

We look forward to hearing about your workshop and seeing images. I am currently preparing for my workshop in Southern California in the Summer.

 

Best,

Fred

[Elisa]

Hi Fred and Thomas.

 

Sorry, I never wrote any thing about the course. For personal reasons such as my last relocation I wasn't able to do it.

 

It have been definitively a good experience. The students were just four.

What I´m more pleased in is that my students were bewitched by the way how the technique works.

Even if two of them were a little impatient in the beginning, bored by making the texture, as they uderstud the reason for that long work they loved the technique.

I will let work my students on smaller pieces next time, at least at the beginning.

 

In this almost first teaching experience I could discover immediately some things which I have to do better the next time.

I could verify soon that it´s not predicted to transmit the “how to”. It wasn´t easy for example to let them keep the right position of the chisel and to explain how deeply one should clean the metal before making the patina.

 

They worked first on brass, than on shibuichi and shakudo.

They fixed their plates on the pitch. My first and biggest mistake was to let work two of them on pitch bases which wasn't heavy enough. The other two students where working much better and I couldn't understand why.

As long as I gave my 7 kg pitch bowl to one of the students to try, finally she was able to make deep grooves without effort and without bending the plate.

Fortunately I could quickly organize other heavier pitch bowls.

I learned that I should try every tool before make it available to the students.

Next time I will also be a bit more insistent about the cleaning step of the metal. In most of their pieces the color came out uneven after the patina.

Any way I will find things to do better every time I repeate this experience.

 

Now I'm refining some insruments for the next workshop which will be in April, obviously also the pitch bases!

It's nice, Fred, that you are preparing at the same time as me your next nunome-zogan course.

 

Finally the students did a grate work.

Here you can see some pictures.

Apart one all the students comes from a contemporary jewellery school, this explanes way they made a lot of abstract designes...

 

In any case I'm proud for what they did in such a short time.

 

best,

Elisa

 

shakudo; brass; shibuichi.

 

shibuichi

 

shakudo. uneven color.

 

shakudo; shibuichi

 

brass

 

Shakudo. In this detail you can see how the silver foil came off in some points just during the patina process.

 

Iron; brass; shibuichi

 

shibuichi.

[Fred E. Zweig]

Elisa,

I am glad that you were able to post the images from the workshop and to share your experiences. My students will be working mostly with iron base and we will also explore the inlay of wire. This is a 5 day workshop that I am teaching and hope they will fully develope an understanding of the process. We will be rusting the iron and then blackening it after we do the encriustation of the softer metal. I will share the results as well. I am also exploring a finer form of nunome zogan with a narrower tagane and closer lines. I hope to be able to teach this many more times.

Fred