Would you like to know about a really really specific way of making jewellery? Something that is part sculpture part science part jewellery? I hope you like reading because I am about to tell you about IT.
Proceed to listen to me tell you about it!
Lost wax casting is a very old technique used to produce one-of-a-kind metal sculptures. At the Royal Ontario Museum I once found a very very small plaque that talked about it:
If you don't want to squint, it basically says that the casting technique is over 5000 years old, that the little statue above the plaque is a bronze work from ancient South India, and then it goes on to describe a process that nobody in my life has EVER enjoyed hearing about in words. After waving my hands in the air and using bad analogies of cake tins and jello and other mould-based concepts, I have drawn a little diagram of what casting actually looks like here.
The diagram shows a green fish and then a gold fish because I drew it for this blog about my Koi Fish :) In real life, they look like this:
On the left there is the green fish before casting, and on the right the gold fish after casting. (I apologize for how weird it looks to have so many left-handed fingers in one image...)
Now if casting is the process that is able to turn the green wax fish into the gold metal fish, wax carving is the process of making the green fish to start. To do this, you need jeweller's wax (which you can imagine to be a bit like candle wax, except harder and less... waxy. It's formulated specifically to use in metal casting.) For rings, I use a premade wax tube that has a convenient cutout so I don't have to deal with it every time.
You'll also need carving tools - essentially anything sharp that can be used to cut and shape the wax. People get creative and borrow/share the same tools from woodworkers, printmakers, and dentists (a profession which reigns supreme over the subject of tiny, pointy metal things). The tool I use the most is just a normal craft knife (the one with the blue handle there), which I sharpen on something called an India stone (SHARPENING is a whole other thing, separate from carving. If you start to look up sharpening you might accidentally learn about the different grindstones, or whetstones (or... waterstones?); you may decide that you must absolutely get yourself a Japanese steel kitchen knife; and suddenly you're sharpening everything in your home, including the nine (NINE!) pairs of scissors that absolutely demand the perfect level of sharpness for all your mad snippety needs.
The Nine Scissors of the Household: for paper, thread, fabric, food, hair, plants, flowers, zigzags (pinking), and everything else.
Anyway, back to the fish. For this specific ring, I also used a rotary machine called a micromotor, which works with different types of burrs or drill bits. Mine is a little tabletop version with a power source, a simple dial to set the speed, and a nice weighty handpiece with an adjustable chuck/collet like this:
Little intermission
Cool! So now that you've seen the history, and the diagram, and some of the tools, I want to take a tiny detour to talk about jewellery design. I prefer mostly freeform carving, which means I don't do a ton of drawing and measuring up front. It's all a little bit more spontaneous, a little more improv if you will, which I love! (Musical improv, especially, is a format that we REALLY enjoy in this household). When I think of a design, like the koi fish, I try to go in with my personal sense of the thing rather than observing it directly. Because I have always loved the shape of the koi, especially butterfly koi, I started with simple line sketches of what I can remember about them:
Gah! So elegant! I suppose koi remind me of dancers in traditional East Asian performance costume - something heavy in silk, with embroidery and BIG SLEEVES. Like this:
OR THIS! 1400s monk & his sleeve MOMENT (while admiring a painting of the moon)
Supposedly koi can live for many years (there is a story of one exceptional old lady koi, named Hanako, who lived for possibly well over 200 years. Though this is hard to verify and could also just be a nice story). Butterfly koi, in particular, are bred to have the longest, biggest sleeves - basically they have a gene for infinitely-growing fins, creating a very poetic situation where the length and beauty of the fins are proportionate to the length of their lovely fishy life. Beauty with age! It is exactly the kind of sentiment I want to put to my jewellery.
Back to the green fish
Okay! So with sketch in hand (and by that, I mean rather vaguely in mind - I tend to ignore anything I've drawn because I get a bit nervous about making it), I use my rotary tool to create THE LINES to start. Lines are very important to me. Once you start to see them you will never look at life the same way. For me I think it is because I learnt to write in Chinese growing up, and Chinese characters are basically tiny tiny drawings that really hinge on the perfect line. As a result I have become equally obsessed with dancers and animation and anything else that has to do with making fun new shapes out of things. At this point I believe my line looks a bit more like napa cabbage than a fish :)
A long break ensues. Days and possibly weeks pass. After taking lots of deep breaths and eating and sleeping and generally un-spooking myself from the process (advice from a kind professor I had in first year and have never forgotten); I carve the fish fins separately and try to attach them to the main body with molten wax. At the time (years ago now) I had very little control over how to hold things as I was working on them, and so I broke the the ring band with my tense little crab-claw pinch. I remember it being very stressful (I'm hours and hours in by this point, with this stuff you really can't just panic hit UNDO). It took me a long, LONG time to release the tension so that I wouldn't break things just by touching them!
Ignoring the missing band and sadness in my heart for the time being, I attach the fins to the main body and continue to smooth out the surface of the wax. This is done by moving the sharp blade very softly over the surface, I guess like if you were trying to gently and psychotically peel a tomato. Refining the wax surface prevents dents and scratches from showing up in the finished metal casting, and also reduces the chance of porosity (little air bubbles, or holes). It is my very favourite part of the process and I find it extremely soothing. Look how shiny and smooth she is now! (Writing this, years later, all I can see are places where I wish I'd gotten it ever smoooother)
Getting over my fear of crushing the ring and possibly having to start this goshdarned process ALL OVER AGAIN, I carve a new ring band and reattach it to the main body with molten wax and a surge of totally unfounded confidence. To melt wax at this small scale, I use battery-operated tool, a pen with a thin wire tip that heats up at the press of a button. This time, I use blue tack to hold the tiny pieces in place so I don't break them AGAIN with my meaty crab claw hands. AND VOILA. IT IS DONE.
Now we are ready for the casting (the diagram from right at the beginning). I take the wax model to my local caster, where they basically do the steps from that diagram, just scaled UP for hundreds of pieces brought in by jewellery industry people all over the city. (Most people don't do the models through handcarving anymore - in standard production, people make CAD models and have them 3D-printed in resin, and these can be cast just the same way.) Handcarving is really pretty special and someday I'll write another post about how you can tell the difference :)
Anyway, casting turnaround always takes a few days because the plaster needs time overnight to set, and I am usually super anxious while I wait to get things back. The way it works, the original wax (green fish) gets melted out and destroyed by the incoming molten metal. With each carving taking many hours I do feel like they're kind of... dying each time ): (Metamorphosis is probably a better word. Do caterpillars die? I read that their memories live on in butterfly form. Insane!)
The home stretch! Below is the raw gold casting, which comes back matte and I think already rather pleasant-looking. But freshly cast or poured metal does have the downside of being somewhat porous (through the middle), so it is always nice to work the metal a little bit and bring out its naturally deeper, glowing lustre.
For this part I use my micromotor to apply different types of polishing compound, which are basically like, sandpaper, but of varying minerals that aren't sand, and also not attached to paper. The rotary tool spins the mineral compound really fast against the metal surface, creating micro-scratches that get smaller and smaller until the surface appears to have a mirror-like polish.
(I wish I had a video of this but years later have still not gotten one.)
In my mind, I picture the polishing process as a little animation that adds more and more sides to a square, such that the square becomes a pentagon, and then a hexagon, and so on. As you get more and more tiny sides to a shape (smaller and smaller scratches on a surface), you eventually have an infinite number of edges, so small that the shape appears as a circle (when lots of tiny parts add up they can appear as one unbroken thing!) That's kind of how polishing works - smaller and smaller shiny scratches add up to present one, large, connected shiny-scratch, bringing the reflectiveness of a surface from matte to mirror.
To bring out the flourish and movement of the fins, I add an extra layer of texture using a diamond tool. It's so nice and now (writing this three years later), this feels like the beginning of my fascination with texture via hand-engraving. Each line cut into the metal reflects light in a different direction while emphasizing THE LINES; the result is just shimmery and mesmerizing and just perfect for this design. Like light through water:
Okay ONE last thing before I go. With every work I try to include a special detail, a little secret - a mystery smile, if you will - just for me, and for the future wearer. My favourite detail for this ring is the way the lines flow through to the inner surface. (I remember I had a lot of trouble getting this photograph; I must try for an updated version of it sometime.) With the goal of the design being to emphasize fluidity and THE LINES, I loved being able to have the main lines of the koi (her beautiful, beautiful sleeves) that wrap all the way around for the sake of continuity :)
Learn more about art jewellery!
- Browse the Gallery for more photographs and one-of-a-kind inspiration.
- Read about my design and craft process in the Studio Journal.
- Connect with me on Instagram for more chitchat and social jewellery fun!