“Hi, I need some cash fast, and I’m on the street selling these things for which I usually ask fifty bucks, but like I said, I need some cash, so I’m selling them for only $3 bucks apiece, metal ebmossings mounted in a coin flip, like you see here. Can you help me out? How many would you like?”
Metal Embossing? It’s cheap, and it’s a total cinch to make ’em, and a total cinch to sell ’em, when you know a few tricks of the trade. Metal embossing is a terrific way for a new artist of ANY age and persuasion to get out there with their artwork, and it’s a great way to get your art into multimedia without a lot of fuss and horrible expenses.
For an established artist, it’s a no-brainer. It puts your art into an affordable category for an original work of art. Usually it’ll be a signed and numbered multiple, which this isn’t. It’s a total original, and an established artist can ask the moon for these things.
Doubt it? Imagine what the price would be for a coin-sized embossed metal piece if you could PROVE that it was made and signed by Picasso? How about Rosenquist, or Lichtenstein, or Warhol, or Basquiat?
I think you get the picture.
Of course, you’re not any of those, and you can count yourself lucky that you’re not, because not only are they dead, they’re more a marketing phenomenon than an art event, which history will easily demonstrate over the next few decades. When the money incentive is gone, the art will be, too.
One great thing about these embossed metal items is that, protected by crystals in a bezel, will last just about as long as the equivalent in solid gold, so the next big crisis for your artwork will be the sun going nova, in about 4.3 billion years.
Most people have no idea how metal embossing is done, and many more people don’t care about that, or indeed, anything you have to offer — they’re just at the fair for the hot dogs, spicy barbecue sauce, cotton candy, supersweet soft drinks, and anything that’s free or looks as if it’s free, in which case they’ll stop off at your booth to have a look to see if there is, indeed, anything valuable that’s being offered for free.
In order for them to actually LOOK at your booth, you’ll need to take some steps to make your merchandise L@@K more attractive and more valuable than the price you’re asking. It HAS to look as if the customer took advantage of you or you won’t make sales anywhere — fair, shopping mall, in embossing parties, or on eBay or Etsy or at the local health food store’s parking lot.
The more cold-blooded marketers call what the potential customer first sees as “Perceived Value”, where the value seems to be more than it can POSSIBLY be.
Nothing measures up to this standard more than gold-colored embossed craft metal sold for a lousy $3 apiece, and I’ll tell you how you can actually make money from that small amount of retail price. You’ll be making $2.50 out of every $3.00 item you sell, and if you only sell 20 an hour, times ten hours at the fair — do the math.
The gold color matches 24k exactly, which is why the things HAVE TO BE MARKED as craft metal, and the backside is left as raw silver-colored aluminum and, although there are double-sided gold sheets made, I don’t use ’em. Why ASK for trouble???
Metal Embossing could be a great concentration exercise for you, an imbuing opportunity, and could produce a healthy side-income, or even become a full-time occupation, if you play it right, and don’t blow away a lot of money getting started. You can get started right away today for a lousy crummy silly $35 bucks for the whole Starter Kit, that gives you everything you need except the kitchen sink.
If you don’t happen to have a kitchen sink, you might ask yourself why you suddenly crave one, when you’ve done without for so many years???? You’ll be able to tell from the Starter Set whether you’d find it interesting and worth your while to pursue, so don’t lay out more than you need to, okay???
Now let’s make an actual PERSONAL MARKET TEST in your local area, from which we can measure and determine YOUR PARTICULAR POTENTIAL SUCCESS RATE IN YOUR HOME TOWN for this very unusual and very attractive product.
In order to sell it well, you’ll have to show people that there’s a USE for them, and that’s simple — just wear one.
We need to establish what YOUR market might be, in YOUR hometown, YOUR workspace, YOUR contacts and YOUR circle of friends and nodding acquaintances and passers-by. Without SOME amount of traffic and contact, ANY plan to market ANYTHING is doomed.
Of course, if you’re not interested in establishing a LIFETIME DAILY PRACTICE of metal embossing or COINOLOGY in general, I’m just whistling in the wind, meaning you’re not hearing me — you’re translating all this from the literal to some figurative imaginary meaning and significance.
That’s okay, it’s just that I have to take into consideration that a LOT of people will read this without interest in the subject, which means that they will have no personal experience personally experienced relative to this DAILY PRACTICE which fits in somewhere amongst the other five-minute practices you might wish to adopt to make your life a LIVING experience instead of a robotic sleep one.
That also improves your odds of working on yourself and preparing yourself for The Work.
Let me anticipate one concern of yours before we launch into anything like the subject in depth. You might be worried about selling items of any kind, because you just don’t run into anyone — anyone at all. You go from box to box to box, home to work to McDonalds to the supermarket to home again, home again, like it says in the nursery rhyme that you hear in your Early Human Training days.
So if you’re interested in the subject, let’s get right to the details you’ll need to actually get started on this potentially quite productive DAILY SPIRITUAL PRACTICE. You can dedicate any amount of time per day to the practice, so long as it’s a minimum of 5 minutes each day.
There is no spiritual practice that will tolerate occasional use. At least SOME level of dedication and commitment is necessary; otherwise, it’s a hobby. Most people accept spiritual practices at the hobby level, like going to church or temple once a week or on the two or three High Holy Days, such as Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in the Jewish tradition, and the Christmas Midnight Mass in the Catholic tradition.
Every Official State Religion has its own agenda, but they all agree on one thing — send money or the fairy dies. State religions can’t be taken too seriously. Their whole purpose throughout human history has been to control the population, period, and fear and superstition do a great deal to keep the Great Unwashed fairly quiet, except on a few notable occasions, such as the Fall of Rome and the recent World Wars and other unpleasantnesses generated by the politicians.
“A country at war with other countries is a country at peace with itself” is a belief that has been sold and sold and sold to the population, and most people come to believe it, but it isn’t true. I’ve been around long enough to see uncountable cultures and entire races go extinct in the blink of an eye, when things go wrong, and they always do, they always do.
And that brings us around to Metal Embossing As a Daily Spiritual Practice. The connections are obvious, if you’ve been paying attention the past few billion years.
With Metal Embossing, you’re in total control of the artistic subject matter and the style, as opposed to etching, engraving or otherwise altering the face or back of an already existing coin, which would fall under the category of “coin-carving” or “Hobo Nickel Art”, which is in itself a wondrous and wonder-filled Daily Spiritual Practice.
How many Daily Spiritual Practices do I offer? I’ve been around a long, long time. I guess I can deliver in the tens of thousands of Daily Spiritual Practices, depending on what planet we’re on at the moment, but in general, I like to deliver about a dozen solid practices to take up the slack 23 hours, 56 minutes and four seconds a day, 7 days a week, 365 1/4 days a year.
In short, one practice all by itself won’t do everything, unless the practice has multiple parts, in which case, it’s technically a number of practices under one umbrella or aegis.
Metal Embossing is one of the oldest forms of metal crafting other than for tack and saddle and better blades, arrowheads and axes — which, among humans, is always the first use of anything, like the anti-matter engine and the black hole transmitters several idiots are building right now, as we speak. Open even a very tiny black hole quite near a large gravity well like Planet Earth, and see what happens; haw, haw, haw!
Now, that’s my kind of humor. Planets blowing up, asteroid hits, mass-extinctions, those are my comedy delights! Of course, I also like the occasional one-liner, like World War III.
Want to know whom everyone blames for World War III?
It doesn’t matter much — up the time-line, there’s hardly anyone around to hear it. World War III doesn’t even get a headline. It’s over before the morning edition can get out on the street, and the news broadcasters never got off the ground.
So what has all this to do with Metal Embossing?
Well, for one thing, you’ve demonstrated your patience and willingness to wait for something that just plain takes its own time to deliver, and that’d be Metal Embossing in a nutshell.
I can translate almost any image into embossed metal, but of course there are limitations, and you’ll have to explore those yourself. Once you have the technique, you’re on your own. The market will reflect your passage through the skill sets from Novice to Master.
It’s hard to explain, hard to effectively demo in an online workshop, and even harder to peddle on the street, but it CAN be done, and YOU could make a small fortune — a VERY small fortune, maybe we’re talking $3.97 in less than a week of applied labor — in Metal Embossing.
I’m joking about the money. Metal Embossing is more than just round coin-like tokens and stuff that goes into jewelry. I’ve personally constructed metal-clad sculptures that measure over 11 feet tall — more than 3 metres high — out of craft metal just like the stuff you’ll be using.
You can also make smaller metal-clad sculptures by cladding shapes of wood or even styrofoam, by hot-gluing the metal onto the wooden or other type of core. I like to distress the extra-heavy black-coated aluminum foil sheets to give the appearance of a bronze casting, then sand down the high points to burnish and leave a dark background in the lower areas.
It makes a very striking METAL sculpture. If you want the sculpture to last in an outdoor setting, merely make the core out of plastic boxes or plumbing materials, then use your glue gun to attach the pre-distressed metal, then sand the whole thing to highlight the high points and keep the lower background area nice and dark.
You can add some green and blue-green bronze tarnish finishes to this to make it look even more like a bronze casting. You can get those bronze, copper, silver and gold tarnishes at any art supply just about anywhere, but knowing which ones work best for you is a matter of personal taste and accommodation to circumstances, so you should work with what you can easily get hold of for a reasonable price without sweat or hassles.
In short, work with what you’ve got. This works with relationships, too, unless you’re thinking you have other options, in which case, nothing works. Work with what you’ve got, that’s the Holy Hobo’s Message here.
Many shops will welcome you in their shop, even in the window, at peak hours, if you offer to make all sales through their register and give them a percentage — I offer a 60/40 split over cost, 60% to the shop-owner, 40% to myself. Sometimes I just give them a straight number to subtract for their share, whatever’s easiest for them.
Remember that the goal is not to make money, although if you don’t, you can’t afford to continue doing what you’re doing full-time, and it might even bite into a hobby. You can’t just give things away and last very long doing that, unless you have an inexhaustible supply of personal wealth, such as the British royals…if they ever get their hands on a Pound again.
Haw, haw, haw, I’ve seen so many currencies and countries come and go, and they always seem surprised.
Anyhow, Metal Embossing…Metal Embossing. That’s what we’re talking about here, and the fact is that I’ve made wall-sized murals out of distressed metal just like the stuff you’ll be using, but in different color schemes, and I’m ready to tackle a few more with the energy remaining to me to do those bigger projects. I like to work in blocks of 2 feet by 2 feet, so they can be easily shipped and easily installed on a wall or as a floor sculpture on a base, without special floor or wall engineering to accommodate the weight you’d expect from a solid metal build.
My clad-metal sculptures are LIGHTWEIGHT, yet LOOK as if they weigh a TON.
I also make Embossed Clad-Metal Wall Clocks, Grandfather Clocks and Mantle Clocks with the same technology, and because they’re cheap and easy to make, they can be priced really low, like $225 retail for a nice mantle clock with a lot of detail work and fine finish, great tones and clockworks, and even a pendulum, if wanted, all the way up to prices in the high thousands, for major works of art like a full-sized Grandfather Clock with cutouts and fancy clockworks, chimes and cuckoos, etc.
Speaking of clocks, did you know that I used to make horrifically fancy grandfather clocks with astrological signs mechanically indicated??? I still have some of those antiuqe clockworks somewhere in storage, I think. If I ever find them, I’ll let you know.
Metal Embossing takes many forms, some of them strange, some familiar. I make and sell small framed embossed-metal landscapes, portraits, still-lifes and interiors, figures both dressed and nude, flowers, seascapes and much, much more, all with nothing but a sharp stylo that costs about two bucks. That’s all I ever use, and I still have and use the one I bought some 35 years ago.
The material I use for my embossing FEELS exactly like gold to work, but it’s aluminum foil, albeit a very heavy foil, made especially for crafting in general and metal-embossing in particular.
It’s hard to find, expensive to buy in small quantities and requires a bit of searching to find a reliable source, but hell, that’s always true and always HAS been true for as far back as the very first Big Bang, which I can remember just about as well as my original hair color.
I offer an introductory Metal Embossing Kit for a lousy $35 bucks, so you can see whether you want to invest a more serious amount of time, money, attention and courage in that arena, and if you do, I’m ready to guide you toward the sources for your materials, so you can build in a higher level of profit to your items. I don’t want to be your one-stop metal embossing shop, so I’m going to reveal ALL my sources at this weekend’s JULY 4th Workshop, which officially begins at 6:30 PDT tomorrow morning.
You’ll need to know WHOLESALE SOURCES of everything you make, in order to manifest well as a metal embosser or purveyor of metal embossings.
You’ll need to know how and where to get the metals — copper, silver, gold and many other color choices are available.
You’ll need a direct source of lockets, rings and other coin-based jewelry, and there are dozens of these, all with different sets of problems and limitations. Some make rings, some don’t. Some make only U.S. sized bezels, some will make special custom items.
You will have to develop a relationship with any bezel makers, crystal glaziers, importers and more, and you’ll have to acquire an expediter at customs to get your parcels through.
These are some of the services I provide by making the products available in kit form. It looks expensive to get your supplies from me, until you experience the actual costs you run into when you try to cut costs by ordering in large quantities, as I am able and willing to do.
I’m willing, because I have long experience that teaches me what kinds of things will do well and what will sit on the shelves for a long, long time.
Imagine cutting your costs down to the level where you could go out onto the street with a bunch of your metal embossings and be able to sell them AT A PROFIT for only $3 apiece!!!
Actually, you can sell them for a DOLLAR and still make a profit, and that’s when you let me provide you with the materials at a price that takes into account what we have to do to get the stuff for you.
It still comes out to less than half a buck per item, your cost to make a round thing out of gold-colored craft metal.
You sell them one by one, one for the front and one for the back of the locket you intend to sell them. They choose which ones they like. You can let them walk off with those for $3 bucks apiece and be making good money — $2.50 profit for every piece you sell. If you sell a hundred a day, that’s $250 profit, and you should be able to do that easily in a highly populated area crammed with working stiffs and wage-slaves.
Of course, if you tell them that you’re not a wage-slave, they will give you the freeze and walk on by, but if you can appeal to their better nature, you’ll sell more than if you crow at them and boast about how you’re off the wheel.
On the other hand, you might get a crowd to the local library just on the concept that they might also make a good enough living from metal embossing to allow them to tell their bosses where to take their job and stuff it.
It’s not considered a brilliant move to do this BEFORE you have established a second means of making a living and proven to yourself that it is stable and will continue to provide even after you quit the day job, if ever the day comes that you decide that you need and can afford to quit the day job and go for the gold, embossingly speaking.
Now, if you’re embossing what LOOKS and FEELS like gold, you’ll be easily able to do the same with real, solid gold, right?
No, even though it’s the same feel and works exactly the same, you’ll have problems with gold that you won’t ever have with craft metal, just because it IS gold, and every mistake costs you a lot of money, including having the piece flip off the workbench into another dimension, which happens to every jeweler now and then.
If it happens to you every day, you might consider just marketing what someone else has made.
When I make a coin engraving, I must pay for the coin, and I must invest a large amount of time and risk to the engraving process, including any high-speed polishing that I might decide to do on top of the knife-work.
Then there’s the matter of the bezel. It must fit perfectly. The coin must not roll around in the bezel. It should receive some protection from the bezel against attacks on its surface, although the coin is exposed frontally and backally, as it were, so there WILL be wear on the coin, which is why you want to use only jewelry-grade coins, nothing above XF, and in my case, it has to fall withing the short range of VF-XF, very fine to extra-fine grade of coin.
My bezels are wholesale priced to allow you some room to move with your retail prices — there’s a bit of “profit” in there above raw cost to accommodate the extra expenses that DO ADD UP really quickly when you’re doing large amounts of business with any vendor.
As I said, you’re quite welcome to establish your own accounts with those vendors. I’m willing and able to fulfill smaller orders, but you will pay a premium for those short-orders, meaning that the more you buy, the lower the price per unit.
Some vendors require a minimum of only $100 per order, but others make you wait until you have enough orders to be able to make a $250 or even $500 minimum, and in the field of gold from the refinery, you’re into megabucks per order, something no individual acting alone could manage.
I can order smaller amounts of gold when my order goes with a much larger order that my wholesale jeweler makes — otherwise I couldn’t manage it at all and, of course, I pay my share of the refinery costs, which are considerable enough to bring you up short when you do the math.
Metal Embossing Made Easy?
It CAN be easy, if you don’t go for the big profits right away. I recommend you try my “Metal Embossing As a Daily Practice” Kit for a lousy $35 bucks. You get everything you need to get started except a Sharpie pen, which I recommend, but isn’t necessary. Any pen will do.
Made Easy doesn’t mean it IS automatically easy. Metal Embossing is exactly like painting. There’s a wide range of skills and talents, taste and engineering, and no two painters produce exactly alike.
What is Metal Embossing? What is Painting? What is Sculpture? How are they done? The answer is always, “it depends on who’s doing it”. Every artist has a way to use the medium, and they aren’t always the same.
Let me send you some metal to work with. It’s clean, doesn’t take up a lot of space, and with the Beginner’s Kit, you can make 21 pieces ready for the marketplace in a matter of minutes or hours, depending on your skills.
You will find that the quarter-sized disks are very easy to work with, and you might find even more success with the larger half-dollar and dollar sized disks.
I cut and flatten the disks for you, and ship in units of 20, 50, 100 or 200. Nobody can use them any faster than I can make ’em and roll ’em, which is what I do. You get a matching “flip” with every disk.
In the Beginner’s Kit, you get a basic tool and a working surface. You can also order the Pro Kit — not sure how much it’ll be, but it won’t be a big deal — which features a full set of metal embossing tools.
I also have several sets of intricate embossing tools that are ordinarily used for leather working, but have good uses in metal embossing as well, and they run anywhere from $30 to about $50 or $60 per kit — you don’t need them all, but they are all very cool devices, so I’ll try to demo them at the workshop this weekend.
Different metals, different exhibition forms, different “frames” — from wall-frames to lockets…and more, including mantle and grandfather clocks, wall pieces, mobiles, statuettes, large municipal sculptures, elaborate frameworks and so much more can be achieved with embossed metal, and it is easy, I assure you of that.
So, I’m off once again, to my workbench, where I’ll be turning out some examples of the art for you to see and perhaps from which to receive inspiration and energy.
Oh, yes, did I mention that you can make the most magical of things with metal embossing? On the obvious side, you can make sigils and all manner of intricate metal carvings and signs and kaballistic notations and more.
On the not-so-obvious side, you can IMBUE the metal embossings, BLESS them, give them energy and spiritual force and send them out on their way across the waves, messages in bottles, that will reach a shore that you will never see.
“Hey, folks! $3 apiece! That’s all, folks! Just three bucks each! Handmade by me, right here in the U.S.A.!” — or, of course, wherever you happen to be located. If you can’t sell your artwork for three bucks, how do you hope to sell it for $1,000???
BEZELS AT TODAY’S GOLD AND SILVER RATES — Add $10 EACH for genuine crystals:
- DIME OR QUARTER-SIZED COIN-EDGED .925 STERLING SILVER BEZEL — $10
- DIME OR QUARTER-SIZED ROPE-EDGED .925 STERLING SILVER BEZEL — $20
- DIME OR QUARTER-SIZED COIN-EDGED 12KGF BEZEL — $20
- DIME OR QUARTER-SIZED ROPE-EDGED 12KGF BEZEL — $40
- HALF-DOLLAR SIZED FANCY ROPE-EDGED .925 STERLING SILVER BEZEL — $22
- DOLLAR-SIZED FANCY ROPE-EDGED .925 STERLING SILVER BEZEL — $25
- DOLLAR-SIZED COIN-EDGED 12K GOLD-FILLED BEZEL — $30
- DOLLAR-SIZED FANCY REAL ROPE 12K GOLD-FILLED BEZEL — $80
- DIME-SIZED 14K SOLID GOLD COIN-EDGED BEZEL — $100
- DIME-SIZED 14K SOLID GOLD ROPE-EDGED BEZEL — $200
- QUARTER-SIZED 14K SOLID GOLD ROPE-EDGED BEZEL — $300
- HALF-DOLLAR SIZED 14K SOLID GOLD ROPE-EDGED BEZEL — $400
Naturally, all the above prices are subject to change without notice based upon changes in the daily gold market, so I’m posting them as rough guidelines only. They are NOT fixed prices in any way, shape or form!
The gold market is tricky and treacherous, so you’d be better off on safer ground unless you know where the quicksand and lime-pits are located.
You’ll note that at the higher prices, your art value becomes a smaller and smaller figure, until it vanishes altogether under the sheer weight of gold prices. Stay with the cheap stuff, you’ll be happier, unless you have a ready market for the high-end stuff.
If you have to peddle something door to door, don’t let it be gold. $3 is your street limit. Keep it simple. Sell in flips, THEN upgrade the sale. Make the small sale first! Complete it, THEN UPGRADE if you can. You’ll do a LOT better!!! Make your ARTWORK pay — don’t be a Metal Seller!!! SELL YOUR ART!
By the way, embossed metal working is great for those with vision problems. I developed a framing technique that leaves the artwork exposed for fingertip viewing by the blind, and have dedicated a website to that effort, “blind can draw”.
The way I make my embossed metal artwork exhibitions is with metalworking that can be viewed by eye and/or by fingertip/hand exploration/viewing.
I can produce life-sized pieces that could be easily viewed by the vision-impaired, and techniques for preserving the surface with many contacts is now available from museum conservation sources.
How about a TOURING BLOCKBUSTER art exhibit especially designed for the blind, but it can also be viewed by the sighted???
Now, how about getting famous folks to COLLAB with their own metal embossings, getting a bunch of celebs to take part in that event, for any cause you care to name. Wanna go there? I’m ready anytime you are.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby