Copper Bear

The first project I will be sharing with you is my copper bear holding a daisy! This was a project done in my Science in Art class in high school. The main idea of this project was to take a thin, copper sheet and rub a sharpened, wooden stick onto it. Rubbing the wooden stick onto the copper heats it, and causes the metal to stretch. The more you would rub, the more the copper would stretch, and the further out the imprint would go.

The first step of this project was to choose an image. Our teacher advised us to not do anything very intricate, because getting the 3D image to look “proportionally 3D” was difficult, even with a very simple design. The image we chose couldn’t be too difficult, but it also couldn’t be extremely simple; it was an art class after all. I personally searched on google for a picture of a cartoon bear holding a flower, and the image that I chose was the perfect mix between simple and difficult. After choosing our image, the next step was to print it out.

Before we were able to work with our copper sheets, we had to cover the edges with masking tape because the sheets were extremely sharp, and it was very easy for us to slice our fingers on it. After that, we were finally able to start making art! The next step was to tape our images onto the copper sheets and trace our images with the wooden stick. After that, it was time to rub out the rest of the image.

We had to pay very close attention to how long we would rub each part of the image. The idea was to rub for a longer period of time on the places that were supposed to stick out more. We could also turn the copper sheet over and rub the other side for parts of the image that we wanted to put further into the background, rather than stick out towards us.

After days of hard work, our copper images were finally finished! Below I have provided an image. As you can see, the petals of the flower and the nose of the bear stick out the furthest. The part around the middle of the flower was a place where I flipped the copper sheet over and rubbed the other side.

Copper turns black as it is exposed to air, so overtime my creation turned darker and darker. This is a picture of the final product.