Imagery on Die Formed Silver with Elizabeth Lyne and Jayne Redman

Elizabeth Lyne is inspired by graceful forms and patterns in nature – soft lines and swirls of feathers and fur, flower petals and butterfly wings. She has brought those impressions to her jewelry by expanding on methods of etching to create a unique process. She is able to control and duplicate her results to provide deep texture and detail to make her jewelry come alive.

Jayne Redman is known for her unusual way of working with metal in three dimensions, often using multiples of the same shape to convey a single idea. Using nature as her inspiration she considers combinations of form and function, integrating mechanics with design and applying innovative engineering methods. She has perfected the process of quickly duplicating shapes by cutting them out with blanking dies and then forming those shapes with tools and jigs of her invention.

Jayne and Elizabeth have combined their knowledge in this workshop. Students will learn how to transform their own drawings, photos, or imagery from copyright-free sources into high contrast, black & white images that are ideal for etching. After etching them onto silver, they will enhance their shapes with forming techniques to give them more dimension. They will create layouts of multiple shapes for etching and make blanking dies to quickly cut them out.

Students will be utilizing a scanner, a computer with image editing software (instructions for Windows & Mac computers provided), and a laser printer to prepare the images.  Students with access to a laptop computer should bring one and can download the free image editing program called Gimp (https://www.gimp.org/downloads/). The class will have at several computers for student use to prepare images.

Images will be transferred onto silver using PnP circuit board film and a thermal laminator or t-shirt press.  Etching will be performed using cupric nitrate and electricity. This etching method produces no toxic fumes and the solution can be filtered to recover all of the silver (which can then be melted or sent back to the refiner with your other silver scraps). After filtering, the solution can be used over and over again.