Tag Archives: coinology

Metal Embossing Projects YOU Can Make & Sell

July 11, 2016Uncategorizedcoin, coinology, ej gold, embossing, foil, gold, gorby, gorebagg, jal, jewelry, metal, metal embossing, past life, past lives, pueblo, silver, soul portraitgorebagg

Pueblo in the Sky looks easy, but offers some serious challenges.

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. Continue reading →

What is a Healing Mandala?

July 8, 2016Uncategorizedart metal, circle, coin, coinology, cornfield, craft, disk, ej gold, foil, gold, gorby, gorebagg, healing, jal, mandala, pendant, silvergorebagg

Selfie at Atlantis Central Zoo & Observatory, 2016. — Selfie at Atlantis Central Zoo & Observatory, Friday, July 8, 2016, 3:46 A.M.

Before I discuss the Healing Mandala, I’d like to point out that, if you’re planning on entering the spiritual game-field of metal embossing sigils, talismans, pendants, rings, pins, headbands, belts, bolo ties and pocket medallions, you will definitely appreciate knowing the following little factoid:

The 24k solid gold disk at 1.4 grams — which is the ideal weight for the small piece, to allow a reasonable retail price-point — when hammered out with a bit of body still left on it, won’t typically fit on the pin-vise without serious compensation and special mountings.

It’s a total pain in the bazonga to try to carve, even if you do manage somehow to put it into a metal harness, because the retaining pins will block your engraving tool and your fingers, making it nearly impossible to complete any cut into the top surface.

However, a 24k solid gold FOIL disk, which is rolled out, not hammered out, can be easily embossed without mounting on a vise — no vise needed for the foil, and the foil could well be an aluminum craft foil, or solid gold foil. Use your fingers to hold onto it.

Your embossing tool can be controlled with one hand, while the engraving tool simply can’t be. You need your other hand to stop the forward movement of the tool, and to guide it onto the target curve or line or gouge.

Funny thing is, once the gold foil or heavier gold slab is inside the bezel and the protective quartz-glass crystals are in place, you can’t tell whether it’s foil or a thicker beaten-out gold disk. Unless you take the locket apart, the foil gold and the heavier “token” weight gold disk, when viewed inside the locket, look exactly the same. Continue reading →

Raving About the New Embossing Metals

July 7, 2016Uncategorizedcoin, coinology, copper, ej gold, embossing, gold, gorby, gorebagg, jal, metal, past lives, rebirth, reincarnation, sale, sell, silvergorebagg

In the course of making several dozen Cornflower Mandalas yesterday, I happened upon a disk made of the embossing metal I’ve been using for decades, now, and duly made a Cornfield Mandala upon it and packed it into a dollar-sized cardboard “flip” coin holder, so-called because to look at the other side of a coin, you flip the flip over with an easy practiced move.

Boy, the key word there is surely “practiced”, and “practiced moves” is what metal embossing and coin-carving is all about, and that goes double for gem-setting and ring-making and painting and sculpting and video gaming and hopscotch and just about anything else you endeavor to do well.

The “right moves” is a Big Number in Buddhism, meaning that it’s important.

“Right Action” means making the right moves at the right time in the right place with the right intention, nice and smooth, making no sudden moves, no ripples in the Firmament or Force.

In short, “Right Action” is grace and movement in relating to the universe and other Beings, and is and was a big subject with Picasso, Matisse, Dali and Stravinski. Continue reading →

Metal Embossing Made Easy

July 1, 2016Uncategorizedbezel, coin, coinology, coins, copper, craft, death, dying, ej gold, emboss, eternal, gold, gorby, gorebagg, jal, jewelry, metal, metal emboss, metal embossing, path, reincarnation, service, silver, skull, skulls, source, vendorgorebagg

Handmade by Local Artisan, only $3 bucks each, come and get it!!! — Handmade Metal Embossings by Local Artisan! Only $3 bucks apiece!!! Look Here!

“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. Continue reading →

Is “The Cult of the Skull” Mainstream Enough for the Washington Post???

June 28, 2016Uncategorizedcoin, coinology, ej gold, gold, gorby, gorebagg, jal, jewelry, marketing, silver, skeleton, skullgorebagg

gorby at his sales desk, Andromeda Sector Shoppe

There are skulls everywhere, and skull novelty items and decorative devices abound in abundance, as it were. It’s not just skulls, of course. There are also full and partial skeletons, and very life-like plastic reproductions of incredibly grisly body parts and even full alien and human bodies.

It seems that on every block, there’s a body shop that specializes in skulls. Well, whom are weem to disagreem???

I thought and thought about a name for the thing, and “Cult of the Skull” seemed the most mainstream, the least offensive and the most likely to agree with current events and popular prejudices.

In short, I may have made a slight tactical error by choosing “Cult of the Skull” as a typical Earthian/Human mainstream marketing concept you might find anywhere on eBay, Amazon or G-G-Google and his goo-goo googly eyes.

You might not be anywhere near old enough for that to be funny. Continue reading →

24k Truth

June 19, 2016Uncategorizedamulet, brane, charm, coin, coinology, contact, copper, cosmo, ej gold, gold, gorby, gorebagg, higher, jewelry, locket, medallion, membrane, nirvanic, norton, pendant, sales, samsaric, sell, silver, talisman, work of artgorebagg

Gold is a product of a succession of stellar explosions and reformulations, yielding more and more complex atoms at each star reformation.

The 24k solid gold medallions are the most powerful CONTACT coins in the world. There is no metal exactly like gold, and gold is the key to opening and passing through dimensional portals.

Gold has “reach”. It “continues” in various dimensions, notably the Six Nirvanic Worlds, which cannot be reached with other metals. Gold is always gold. It never changes, and it has its own “constant”, which will someday be important to scientists. You can carve a simple visual “bumpy” message into PURE gold, and it can be read in the Higher Planes.

Gold Tokens can be made from scratch. They need not be altered coins and in fact, I don’t recommend altering gold coins at all. I work on a flat, hammered planchette or disk, fairly thin, at about 13mm in diameter, to fit into the 14k gold “U.S. $1 Gold Piece” Locket, which retails out at about $450-$650, depending on the artwork.

I wholesale those out at $112.50 apiece, which barely accommodates the cost of the metal and, in fact, at an art or crafts fair, I can make about $7,500 an hour just putting beads on strings and making someone’s name on a copper bracelet, but you couldn’t pay me enough to actually do that — I’m just making a point here about labor and art and what the art is worth.

I think the artwork that I engrave and etch into every single one of my little gold plaques is worth a whole lot more than fifty bucks, but I’m willing to let YOU take the profit. If you want to use some of your profit to assist the Sangha, it’s entirely up to you.

Those gold lockets should, and can, and DO, sell for hundreds of bucks, not because it’s gold, or because it’s magic or quantum, but because it’s a WORK OF ART by an actual working world-class listed American Official White House and IAJE Artist, not a mass-produced mechanical lump spat out of an all-too-common stamp-out machine somewhere overseas and off-shore, and I never said the word “China”. Continue reading →

Wake Up, Stupid!

June 15, 2016Uncategorizedawakening, coin, coinology, dead, deadski, death, dying, ej gold, electric shock, ghost, gorby, gorebagg, skeleton, skelly, skull, spirit, spirit coins, waking shockgorebagg

Waking Up Is Hard To Do. — Waking Up Is Hard To Do; it’s a constant long-term effort that begins with a shock.

Wake up, stupid. That’s not to be read as “wake up stupid”. Everyone who finds themselves in the Work has come to it after a shock awakens them from robot life. By shock, I mean an electrical one. Sometime in the past, there was a shock, and that shock caused an initial awakening, an awareness of Being.

There are other ways of delivering that shock, not involving a joy-buzzer or a hairpin and an electric socket. We’ll explore one such way in a moment, but first, let’s assume that you did, indeed, receive an Awakening Shock, for some reason and in some way, however odd.

At first, you didn’t know what to do. All you knew was that you felt an empty ache — there was something you should be doing, learning, mastering, but what? Continue reading →

How to Actually SELL Your Shit

June 13, 2016Uncategorizedbanker, broker, buy, carved coin, cash, coinology, dead, death, dying, ej gold, energy, gorby, gorebagg, hobo, jester, king, money, nickel, queen, sell, shit, spirit, wall streetgorebagg

selling bardo challenge coins at gallery — Selling Hand-Carved Bardo Challenge Coins at the Gallery

How to sell your shit…back in the day, I’d never have used the word “shit” in any context, in any company, “mixed” or not, meaning men and women together in the same room, in which case, there were no “dirty” or “blue” stories, jokes, riddles, puns or gags.

These days, we’ve gone so far across the arc on the pendulum of Robot Life that we’re now in a world in which “shit” is GOOD, in fact, it’s the greatest, so I’m calling your Carved Coins “shit” and hoping that you now have a good plan for their production in your home studio.

What is the “shit” you’re trying to peddle, anyway?

It’s a Spirit Coin, a Bardo Challenge Coin, if you will, and it’s a formerly ordinary copper, silver or gold coin that has been carved to show a skull under the skin, usually by an exaggerated set of teeth, a bold jaw, an open eye-socket and a few upper vertebrae, while the pretty part of the face remains intact. The whole is polished and finished, blessed and packaged to sell or ship, but one fact remains, and this is what you’re really here on planet Earth to do:

At the first moment that you show a Bardo Challenge Coin of any kind to anyone, they will receive and feel a powerful shock.

The coin carries with it not only Shakti-Pat as a result of the Blessing, but also sports a stunning visual reminder of one’s mortality, of everyone’s mortality, in the form of a ruler, king, noble, lord or goddess of liberty.

This shock does not spread through the system. It is quantum, and hits the whole body-mind all at once. The effect is astounding, predictable and certain. The subject’s REACTION to that shock will be one of three possible results:

Continue reading →

Death, Spirit, Remembering, Awakening, Enlightenment

June 6, 2016Uncategorizedbronze, coil, coinology, crystal, dead, death, dying, ej gold, electric, extra-dimensional, gold, gorby, gorebagg, magic, metal, quantum, quartz, radio, reincarnation, silver, transformation, voyager, xdgorebagg

Why my coins are not hobo nickels:

Simply put, I have a fine-art approach to the coin carving, not a numismatic one. I don’t care much for hard-edge art and care even less for literalism and so-called “realism”, which isn’t anywhere close to realness. I use a free-form line, more drawing and sketching than the tightly repressed world of gravure you generally see, although there are more artists discovering coin engraving every day, and more artistic renderings are available.

Look on eBay to see many examples of recent hobo nickel art and other coin carvings.

The story of the hobo nickel arising out of the hobo jungles of the 1929-1939 Great Depression is simply that when you got hold of a spare nickel, you could carve it into a dollar’s worth of food and lodging. I like to use the same spirit in carving my coins as the hobos enjoyed in their day, meaning that I scratch at it — I don’t slice and cut the way a modern engraver would and should do. My approach is more “Paleo”, more basic, more street-wise and less technological, less dependent on civilization to maintain it.

Most hoboes used an ordinary 6-penny nail or a broken file to scratch their carvings into the nickel, and it’s those moves I’m trying to duplicate. Continue reading →

Coin Checkers is as old as Humanity

May 10, 2016Uncategorizedcheckers, chess, coin, coinage, coinology, denominations, ej gold, gorby, gorebagg, time travelgorebagg

As far back as humans walked the Earth, there were games, many of which were played on a field that had been drawn in with a sharpened stick, or boundaried by rocks, and in the case of Kalah and similar “pocket” games, the landing places were scooped out of the dirt.

Pieces for those early “board” or “flat” games were typically made of wood, stones, shells and in fact anything that was traded as money, including beads. Yes, beads were used as game pieces, and I have a large collection of ancient board game pieces that show how broad the variation could be.

Historians today weren’t THERE, actually THERE, in the Old West, when people had nothing to do but play checkers after the daily chores were done. Who had checker pieces? But everyone carried SOME cash — you had to. Credit cards didn’t exist back then, and hardly did money.

Cowboys would bet penny against penny. Of course, it had to be “even money”, no such thing as nickels against pennies, unless one of the players was a pro gambler with some sort of edge that gave him the long-term win.

So who owns which penny?

The solution is so simple and so obvious that it was thought of thousands and thousands of years ago. Continue reading →