“Love planted a rose, and the world turned sweet.”—Katharine Lee Bates

A couple of weeks ago I started talking about my metal sculpture project for jewelry I. Well it took a little longer than I thought but it is finally done and I love it. As an artist you learn that the idea in your head for what you want your piece to look like doesn’t always turn out that way. There were a few complications along the way and I had to change a few things about the piece but it wasn’t too extreme. Overall I feel like it turned out better than my original idea.

The rose petals themselves are made out of a copper sheet which was then wrapped around itself. The stem is made from copper plated wire which was then twisted together to give it strength. The under side of the rose and the leaves are made out of nickel. To give the leaves a realistic quality I placed a leaf between two sheets of nickel and put it through the rolling mill. This left the impression of the veins in the leaf on each of the sheets of nickel. After, I cut the pattern of the leaf out and hammered them to bend like real leaves would.

To give the petals of the rose a velvet look I sand-blasted them with small glass beads. I wanted the leaves and the part under the rose to have an old look to it. So after the metal is heated up it is usually put into a pickling solution which cleans off any residue left behind by the torch. This gave the nickel a little green tint to it which I really liked. I took some wire wool and cleaned up the leaves slightly so that you could see the pattern in them but besides that I left the nickel alone. The green color on the nickel gave it a natural quality a real leaf on a rose might have. I’m very pleased with the results. What do you think?