Creative Welding

Creative Welding: Sparks N Glows

Metal is a wonderful artist material. It can be a canvas for traditional paints or you can make colors with patina's derived from the metal itself. You can create complex and intriguing structures and these structures can have compelling exotic textures of metal molten and tortured in various ways. You can make furniture as art, picture frames that will compete with the art itself that it frames. Sculpture that you can build a strand at a time and take away if it does not work with your concept. Metal fabricating is a rewarding material and method to work with.

You do however have to learn some processes and work with some unique tools. This studio workshop will acquaint you with the process of heating steel to a glowing temperature when it will yield to manipulation by hand or blows. You can make metal forms and then bend other metals and shape them around the forms to create repetitive structures that can be assembled in 3d space to create rhythmic elements. You can heat and beat textures into steel, you can pile shapes on top of each other to create complex elements. It's a new old world or metal working. You will learn the equipment used for heating metal using air/acetylene and oxy/acetylene heating & brazing. You will also learn the basics on Tig Tungsten Inert Gas aka Gas Tungsten Arc welding as this is a mellow welding process without as much drama as other processes. With practice it yields the cleans weld joints that can be ground, sanded and polished to the point where the weld just disappears which is important in the aesthetics of art pieces. Or you can make them gnarly if that is what you choose.

At the end of the day you will be able to and have done bending, welding of steel using the above mentioned processes. You can then continue to build those skills and make furniture or art at our workshop as a member if you do not have a place to work at your home or business. So come on and join, learn and make something, the experience will serve you for a lifetime.