Metal Tooling - Jeweled Bugs (drawing and embossing)

You will begin today by folding your square of paper in half so that you have a line of symmetry. Your task is to draw a large bug of your choice using bilateral symmetry on the square of paper. Your bug may be an insect or an arachnid. Just use a good photo reference to make sure that you're including the correct amount of body parts, wings, antenna, and legs. To have perfect bilateral symmetry, you might want to use the graphite transfer technique that we learned about last class. Let's review how to do this. If I want to transfer this wing, I will fold my paper in half on the fold I began with, and I will use my pencil to just color over the area that I want to transfer, which is the wing, and I'm also doing the leg right now too. I'm pressing firmly when I do this so that when I open up my paper, the pencil for my drawing has been pressed onto the paper on the other side, just enough so that I can see it and I can use those lines to help myself draw the body parts correctly. I want you to draw all of the body parts first and make sure that you are really using the entire sheet of paper. It's small to begin with. It's only five by five inches, so use the entire sheet of paper to draw your bug and then begin adding its details. Details might be things like stripes, shapes, maybe some textures that you see in areas like wings or you know body parts or shells, eyes, things like that. When your drawing is finished, you are ready to emboss your drawing into a sheet of metal. You will only get one sheet of metal, so you need to do this part carefully and have your drawing checked first to get your metal. First step will be to tape your drawing down to the metal using masking tape. I would put at least two, maybe even three pieces of tape on your work so that you're connecting the paper to the metal, so use different sides. I also recommend you try to put the tape where you don't have pencil lines so that you don't have to draw over top of the tape. Once you're ready to actually emboss your drawing onto the metal, you will need to pick up a sheet of felt and fold it in half. It does not matter what color the felt is. Again, just make sure you fold it in half and then place your metal, which has the paper on top of it, on top of the felt. You're going to trace over all of your pencil lines. You can do this with a pencil or you can do this with a ballpoint pen. Again, trace over all of your pencil lines. Press firmly, but not so firmly that you tear your paper. If your paper starts to tear, just move along and press a little more gently. When you take your paper off and check your work, you should see that all of your lines have been embossed into your metal. If you need to press them further into the metal, you can press them again with a dull pencil. Next class, we're going to begin metal tooling, which is where we use tools to push out from the back side the metal and press it forward so that we get texture on the front in low relief. We'll talk more about how to do this next class and the different tools that we'll be able to use. But for cleanup today, you just need to make sure that you get your name on your work. You can do this with a little tape flag. If you have already taken the paper off of your metal, make a tape flag that has your name on it and stick it to your metal. And if your paper is still attached to your metal, then you can just put your name on that using tape or a pencil and then put it into your folder. Remember, you only get one sheet of metal for metal tooling, so please take good care of it.