My style of embossing is free-hand and free-style. Unless illustrating by example some technique or interesting embossing tool, I use only one very basic tool — a very tiny ball-tipped embossing stylus, and that’s about it.
Once in a while, I’ll use the nylon tip on the other end of my basic tool to make a larger dip in the metal from the back side, but other than that, it’s just one tool and the movement of my hands and fingertips.
You can’t just “straight draw” on metal, even foil. It doesn’t LIKE to be pushed around, and it will fight you and make you go crinkly and lumpy and weird.
Curved lines are the bane of every engraver. Spend a few hours mastering it before you screw up hundreds of pieces that COULD have worked, had you taken the time to discover how to make curved lines work in metal foil.
If you’re working in the thicker material, you’ll have to find your own way. It’s not easy to work that stuff, and anything thicker than .36 gauge will probably defeat any beginner, although there’s always beginner’s luck.
“Pueblo in the Sky”, illustrated above, uses straight lines against curves to achieve its effect. You start by drawing in the sidewalks, then add the building on the right, starting with the left top and working your way toward the doorway, actually a triple arch, if you’ll take notice. The dots on the sidewalk can also be circles or squares, to add to the illusion of depth.
Straight lines are easy to emboss free-hand on foil. They will tend to look exactly the same as your drawings on paper. As a matter of fact, even your sculptures and ceramics will reflect your drawing skills or lack of them.
If you’re not very good at drawing, try some of my art books on the subject. I can help anyone learn to draw, even if they can’t even draw a stick-figure.
All the “City in the Sky” projects, of which “Pueblo in the Sky” is one, tend to deliver that “unsteady” feeling, that palpable gut-instinct that tells you that, when you look really carefully at particles, energy and other material stuff, that there’s really nothing there, and according to the latest physics polls, you’d be right.
There’s a suggestion of “other-worldliness” about “Pueblo in the Sky” that helps some folks get over or through the barrier between worlds. In addition, you can make ANY SETTING a subject for an “in-the-sky” treatment.
Merely REDUCE the building style to its most basic lines and forms, then fit it, or just part of it, into the circle boundary, then refine, refine, refine, until you get it RIGHT, then record the result, put it in a flip and try to duplicate it.
If you can’t seem to dupe it, you didn’t get it right.
Now make a pageful of those things and get out there and try to SELL them, for $ apiece or more, and see how far you get. Yep, you’ll need more than just one subject and style to please ALL the customers, so let’s look at some more designs you can make and sell, shall we???
I created these designs from much more complex three-dimensional & moving forms, compressing the essentials into just a few lines or short marks on the metal. Once you’ve mastered my designs, you’re invited to create your very own Iconic Designs from your very own studio, or go ahead and use mine.
Don’t ever worry about copying, especially in metal embossing. No matter how hard you try, no two pieces will ever come out exactly the same. That’s the beauty of hand-crafting, although most people actually PREFER the machine-made crap — they’re trained to prefer it, and that tells you that YOU ARE DEALING WITH THE BOT-BRAIN, and that that person is probably NOT your customer.
The simplicity of design will soon eliminate the bots from your booth. They can’t stand simplicity, and will often ask the two most common questions about your product:
“How long did it take you to do this?” and “Is this real gold?”
When you stop laughing, you can answer any way you like — rest assured, this is not a sale you’ll make easily, if at all. Your real customers are the ones who are turned on by the subject matter, style and look of your product.
It’s all about how you REDUCE your image to ESSENTIALS ONLY, and make it work.
As you explore the medium of metal embossing in general, and foil-metal embossing in particular, you’ll soon see how to eliminate fluff and overdressing from an image, to reduce, reduce and reduce down to the bare essentials, just enough visual information to get the idea across, which is the boil-down essential of Reductionism, the artform I invented in 1967, based on what I had learned in Bob Glover’s “Industrial Design” course at Otis Art Institute, which was founded on Cangialosi’s “Simplify the Form” concept, taking out all the minor local bumps and valleys, keeping the interlocking forms simple and easily defined, just in case you thought “Abstract Art” was a cop-out. It isn’t. There are definite rules, most of which amateur artists know nothing about.
Can you be an amateur artist and win the game???
Sure you can. Why not? Every self-taught artist in the world is singular and different, and every style has its own merit and appreciation index. I’ve seen thousands and thousands of works of art that would bring hoots and cat-calls from a crowd, yet those same artworks brought tears of joy, laughter and heart-warming delight from the artist’s aunts and great-aunts, and so will yours.
You don’t have to be a great artist, or even a well-trained and highly skilled artist in order to sell your art these days, any more than you need to learn to sing in order to be a pop star.
You no longer need to achieve press-status and celebrity rank. You don’t need to crawl and beg for mercy before either the art critics or the gallery directors. You have FACEBOOK and eBay and Amazon and millions of similar websites and apps and options.
These days, everyone’s a book publisher; everybody’s a video producer; the whole world’s an endless fountain of personal expression, and facebook is the singular centrum of human consciousness at the moment, although that’s quickly changing — oh, not the actuality, just the name of the trending website of the day.
Oy. I know what’s going to happen soon, here in the 21st century, and you’re not going to like it.
Given the situation, you may as well get whatever work done you can get done, and that’s why we’re going to dig right in. Let’s get started on some metal embossing projects that have some Work Merit to them, shall we??? Tempis fugit.
The Soul Portrait is an easy “Street-Fair Project”, because it’s simplified down to a few basic lines to indicate features.
You’ll want to start with the egg-shaped oval that forms the head-shape, then add the neck and shoulder lines, then the ears on each side, the eyebrow & nose, the mouth, then hair and other details.
What you need to do is to get the eyes, nose, mouth, ears, chin and hair REALLY RIGHT, and with those in place, your customer will surely agree that it’s them, or sort of them, which is fine, if you ADMIT that you’re an art student working your way through art school at the age of 63, and why not?
In this day and age, everybody has to have at least two “hustles”, to use the vernacular — by which I mean, “two or more separate and distinct sources of income”. If you don’t put on airs, your work will be better accepted.
So in a Soul Portrait, you’re trying to capture the very essence of the subject sitting for the portrait — that’s right, sitting. I’ll illustrate HOW you set up a “portrait sitting”…
You set up a chair across the table or countertop, or in a small tent to the side, or within the booth on the LEFT side of the entrance to the booth, never on the right — wondering why? Ask anyone who tends doorways at public buildings. They never use the “wrong” doorway, even if there’s a huge line where they are, generally on the left, and no line where the other open door is, usually to the right of the entrance — but in either case, the empty slot is not where people tend to go.
If you have an inch and a half of clever inside you, half a cup of vivid imagination, one pound of interest, a bit of high attention, and a pinch of elan-vital, you can easily combine the Soul Portrait sitting with a TAROT READING, give them double punch value for their $3 buck or $10 buck or, if you dare and don’t mind sitting alone for long, long hours at a stretch, their $20 buck investment.
Yes, “investment”. People can easily throw $50 per person into a restaurant meal, a couple of hundred or several thousand in a Disneyland Experience or a 7-day cruise, and yet consider $3 bucks spent on a trinket at a street fair as an “investment”. The consideration makes it a lot harder to sell a trinket than a hot dog.
There’s always a “right” side and a “wrong” side to any street, including a street at a fair set in a public park or playground. On one side, the traffic moves and clusters around booths, and on the other side, just ten feet away, there’s nobody, and the vendors are wondering why.
It’s all about the Bot Brain.
The Bot Brain works in mysterious, but totally predictable, ways, which can bring the higher-than-average Being really down.
Human buying habits are totally predictable, and the more sordid merchandisers have the whole thing totally down, starting with a Diva Promotion and ending with a 50% off sale at the local mall.
Shopping and buying and trading are AUTOMATIC survival mechanisms built-in to the DNA — they are not learned, although the habits CAN be somewhat modified by culture and personal experience personally experienced.
Second-hand experience –warnings from parents, etc. — produces babies and other family accidents. Nobody believes someone else’s experience could possibly relate to THEM, because they and their lives are SO unique! But enough, back to the project at hand…
A Soul Portrait is an abstracted portrait, a caricature, if you will. The idea here is to somehow capture the SPIRIT of the subject, not the FACE. Good luck on this one — most folks don’t have the confidence to pull this off, but once mastered, you’ll do well, and you’ll be helping lots of folks get in touch with their higher selves.
The “Bot Brain” is what Gurdjieff might have called “sleep”. It refers to the organic self, and is part of a much larger brain called the “Mother Mind”. Human Carbon Based Bots are directed and controlled by the Mother Mind, with limited local autonomy provided by DNA directives contained in the so-called “Junk DNA”.
If your subject is very cool and funky and far-out, you might discuss doing a combination Soul Portrait and Skull, making a rather strange-looking object that can and will cause comment at home, office or public library.
When you wear a skull, especially one that looks as if it’s made of solid 24k gold — but it isn’t — people will take notice. You will get comments, some good — “Where did you get that???” and “God, that’s weird.”
When you explain that you’re obsessed by death and that you consider everything from the viewpoint of morbidity, they’ll understand and relate, and that’s when you whip out the SKULL PORTRAITS and say, in your best Phil Silvers accents, “Hey, you wanna talk morbidity? Lemme show you some skull portraits. I can do yours right now, if you like.”
People skills? The hell with People Skills. Stick with me, and I’ll help you develop “Alien Skills” so you’ll be able to easily and comfortably converse with the strangest and weirdest off-worlders you’ll ever meet at a street fair here on Earth or, indeed, anywhere else in the MultiVerse you have learned to call “Home”.
If your client presents as female, merely alter the neckline, possibly add some beads or pearls or whatever your subject is wearing at the time — if nothing, then add nothing. I like to add drop earrings, as you see them in the example above, but if the earrings are distinctive on your subject, copy their general form, to add to the effect that it is a portrait.
It is absolutely imperative that you get the eyes, hair and mouth really “right on”. If the neck is long and thin, exaggerate your image a little, to emphasize the importance of this unique feature that gives your ABSTRACTED portrait credibility.
In embossed metal, the hair style will be pretty generalized. You can learn to make curls by making small spirals. Sometimes circles within circles works well, and sometimes just a swirl of the embossing tool makes it work.
Watch the bangs or front locks or side curls. Look carefully at your subject and ask yourself what is REALLY NECESSARY to get the idea across. Is there a unique feature anywhere on the face? Is there any part of the hairstyle that stands out, such as a band or hair ornament?
Look carefully at your subject. Are the earrings distinctive? Draw them in. Is the mouth really unusual? Draw it precisely as you see it, using only two lines, top and bottom.
What about the eyes? Did you get their shape? In a small portrait on metal, this is not going to be easy, but I assure you that you CAN master it in only a few thousand hours.
Here’s a free-hand drawn example of a Soul Portrait, in this case, of “Mr. Lee”. I can draw his portrait either from a photo or from memory, and every portrait will be different, because the face changes radically from decade to decade and from expression to expression, and in addition, we’ve worked in a variety of bodies and world-forms, so it does tend to run together.
I prefer a Soul Portrait that transcends bodies, and that means that it transcends time-binding caused by space, energy, matter and, of course, the ever-present digital clock against which all things are measured.
So is that a portrait of Lee? Yeah. I saw him looking exactly like that, and I’ll tell you when and where. We were out in back of St. George’s on Alta Street in 1978, sitting on the back lawn just beside the steps.
Radha was sitting with Morgan, and several kids were playing within a few feet of us, and I turned to listen to something Lee was saying, about children and natural intelligence, and there was that “look” — nothing like the classic “Lee Portrait”, because the hair, mouth and eyes are all “wrong”, but I have several photos from that time period that proves my point, but the real point is that it doesn’t HAVE TO BE EXACT, doesn’t have to match the physical appearance at all, in order to be an effective Soul Portrait.
I know what you’re going to say. The “Mr. Lee” and the “Unspecified Saint” look pretty much the same. God, I don’t know how else to get this across to you —
In metal embossing, anyone with a beard will tend to look the same as anyone else with a beard.
The whole point is in getting the SHAPE of the beard right, getting the MOUTH right and getting the EYES right — in Lee’s case, you want to capture that little crinkle in the outer corners, and the shape of the NOSE and MOUTH are both extremely critical for recognition, if you want it to photo-realistically resemble the physical form, a thing from myself I do not demand.
Saints come in several flavors — bearded and unbearded, which can include male and/or female. Some Saints are of the Catholic variety, some are of the Indus Valley style, and yet others may be far older, such as Saint Murray of Sumer, or quite recently sainted, such as Saint Augustina of Wisconsin and Saint Rufus of San Dimas.
I have an entire catalog of Angels, and another of Saints, including Gurus and Deities. These will be made available as I find the time to get them up online with explantions.
In the case of the Saint, it’s up to you how to represent your subject, and it really doesn’t matter, because it’s a Devotional Object, and therefore the INTENTION is everything, not the expression or some sort of imaginary placement on some sort of Galactic Objective Scale of Artistic Merit, which I personally have both in hard-copy and on a backup drive.
It’s similar to the EMS — Electro-Magnetic Scale, with a few notable exceptions in the Infra-Red Range, as you’d expect from a rank amateur like Jehovah.
Voted Least Likely to be Class Valedictorian, Jehovah has had His ups and downs with this little mudball, and His success record with human beings is not to be envied.
Myself, I like a species with a bit more “bite” to it, and I abhor living within any species that prefers to be non-telepathic, out of touch with the Mother Mind AND the Cosmic Consciousness, if such a thing is possible, and believe me, it is — I have living proof, which I’m bringing back with me to the 37th century.
Sometimes I have the inclination to just turn it all off, don’t you? That’s why I invented the next design, the Madonna, counterpoint to The Saint.
Oh, sure, Madonna the rock star will surely pre-empt any real Madonna in this day and age, but there’s always room for improvement, and my Madonna — that’s “my” twice in a row, as “Ma” in this sense means “my” — has tons of room for improvement.
This particular example, drawn for a live-camera instructional upload on ej gold guru on youtube, resembles the young girl in “Start the Revolution Without Me”, don’t you think? It also resembles Dr. Janet and possibly you can see in this figure the face of Jill St. John, or Buffy St. Marie or Hot Lips Hoolihan???
You’ll notice that I gave her a very large-bead necklace, but it could just as easily be a chain with a locket or no jewelry at all, depending on what kind of impression you want to create here.
I’ve added two lines for the neck and one for the base of the neck, plus a couple of lines that might or might not be scapula. Note the deliberately indeterminate shoulder lines, which are dominated by the hairlines that can be straight or swirling, as you wish.
You have a real choice here in terms of the SHAPE of the eyes and eyebrows, and with a very fine line, you can narrow the eyebrows into a very glamorous shape with lots of expression toward positive, negative and exalted, using different angles and shapes.
The mouth is also very vulnerable to precision shaping, because it’s large enough to be easily discernable, so you’ll want to put some attention on it to get it just right. Remember that, to a certain degree, you can alter your work if you make a mistake, but at some point the metal starts to shred. Don’t go too far.
The eyes can look up, look down or be closed or half-closed, with just a deft twist of a line. The same can happen with the nose, where SHAPE is everything, determined by a single line that extends from the eyebrow to the bottom of the nose — one line.
Another line for the other eyebrow, then two lines and two dots to make the eyes. Add the signature and date, and you’re done, ready for the next client in your long line at the fair.
“ZombiGirl” is a Team Fortress playing character of mine that became, sometime during the decade of the 1970s, a comic book character that I found myself drawing as a daily insertion in several Hollywood rags and, of course, in Chester Anderson’s “Tuesday’s Child” newspaper that came out of Arthur Kunkin’s “Freep”, the Los Angeles Free Press.
It wasn’t actually free in the sense that they gave the paper away. In fact, it supported the street kids who sold it. The news was not dictated by the Establishment, hence, “Free”. There is no such paper or website now, although they’ll tell you they are free.
The reason they’re not free is that they are directed by the Mother Mind through the Bot Brain, and that makes them part of the scene, no matter what the Psychological Warfare Cover looks like. Appearances can be deceiving. No, make that “appearances ARE deceiving.”
So, since ZombiGirl is my own creation, I can make her look like anything, dress her any way I like, and give her any expression I think would be right. One thing I DON’T do in her case is change the hairstyle.
Her favorite hairdressers in Palm Beach and Palm Springs are Mix Master and Osterizer.
Not that the Alien ISN’T a Saint or a Guru or a God or Goddess, but there is a definite “look” to the Alien that keeps it quite apart from all the other portraits and portrait-busts you might decide to manifest in metal.
It’s all about those tell-tale “almond eyes” and that skinny, highly improbable neck that is a dead giveaway that what you’re looking at here is a robotic “Grey” alien, with a stainless steel backbone, and that the lack of features is not a liability in a metal-and-silicon-plastic quantum-telepathic as-if-immortal windup toy with a brain as big as a planet.
Sure, a brain as big as a planet. What did you think? Hook them all up and every single one of ’em’s interchangeable with any other. Need an engineer there? Just install the Engie Character and you’ve got an engineer. Need a soldier? Same deal, just install the Skill-Set.
Naturally, F&B (that’s Flesh & Blood) Aliens are different and look very different. Some of them look exactly like humans, only taller. Other species of alien look like a hairy ape, some look sort of lizard-like, and still others are cuddlier than a koala bear and deadlier and less emotional than a fast-striking rattlesnake.
Of what possible USE is an Alien thingy made in embossed metal? How would you carry it? Where would you put it? What would your customer DO with it???
Frankly, I never ask.
What I prefer to do is to offer several suggestions for possible use, from fridge magnet to pendant, ring, key chain or belt buckle. You may never sell a single Alien Portrait, but it sure opens up some far-out conversations.
Pictured above, you’ll see a view of the Hudson River around Beacon, New York, seen and drawn from the Jersey side. Beacon is where my music teacher, Pete Seeger, lived with his family.
You’ll note that the sun is extra-large, and that it pokes up over the mountain in a very dramatic way. In my landscapes and figure drawings, I might exaggerate features to make them work and balance in a harmony that is achieved without symmetry.
There is JUST enough visual information here to suggest a river with a town along its bank, mountains in back and a sun overhead. There is a suggestion of foreground, just a wiggly line to indicate the near-bank, and another wiggly line, above which I added the roofs and part of the building body of the houses across the water.
This could also be part of the “May the Longtime Sun Shine Upon You” series, suggested by a gift of a gold medallion given to me many years ago by my artist/model friend Charmaine Moo.
“Rainy Woodstock ## Day” has a bunch of rain coming down, as indicated in the sky, but not in front of the buildings, which would be more right, but would cause visual disturbances that would confuse and confound the viewer, so I left them out.
There are raindrops on the pavement, and there are LOTS of ways of indicating wetness, including reflections of the buildings on the pavement or in the roadway or street, if you like.
I just kept the illustration simple, to show several ways to go here. You’ll note that one door has no interior detail, which is one way to do a door. Another is with a “light” or window in the door, which you can see at the extreme right, the entrance to the shop. There’s a window in front of the shop, and an alleyway or “mews” leading to the upper right.
The whole idea here is to convey MASS, dimensional figures, characters, buildings, anything you like, but make it FULL and FAT with MASS and BULK. Shape is more important here because everything is simplified and therefore magnified.
You will do well to note the DIRECTIONS of my lines in the Woodstock street scene. Each ANGLE gives the eye some indicator of how the mass is sloped and in which direction, from higher to lower.
Don’t struggle for DETAIL. Stay simple, unadorned, unembellished. In the case of the Cornfield Mandala, for instance, you’ll see the incredible effect of the large plain areas.
In the Portal, I keep the images simple and iconographic — the sun and rolling fields and mountain range on the other side, and the metallic and formidable nature of the gateway on this side, with a definite separation between the two interconnected worlds.
I may or may not add a surrounding circle or circle and dots, being watchful not to add too much detail and confusion to the image.
You want, once again, to exaggerate the DIRECTIONAL ANGLES of the lines, to make certain that the eye buys the suggestion of space, mass and fullness.
(CONTINUED NEXT BLOG)
See You At The Top!!!
gorby