Gilding, molding and spray painting.

Now we have done our last time in the classroom and it is time for us to go out on our internships. This semester we have studied the courses gilding, casting and spray painting. Time has really flown away! It feels so weird to pack your stuff (read billions of things) and not see each other again until the fall. I just got started?

We have learned everything from laying imitation gold and 24k gold, glass gilding, building frames, making our own molds, testing lots of different casting materials and more modern techniques such as spray painting. It has been so much fun and I have learned so many new techniques! I really liked gilding. Especially on glass! It's a bit like painting but with gold leaf and various metals on glass. And molding. So much fun you can do with molding. I don't know what happened, but I've had some kind of banana theme at my bench. Our first task in molding was to make our own form of any object we'd like. The first thing I saw was my banana laying on the bench (that I would have for the 14 o'clock coffee break) and then I thought I could make a form of that one. Just for fun. Once I've made the molding form for the banana I poured in plaster and got a really good plaster banana! Over time, I had suddenly made 10 bananas that I both gilded and decorative painted. They became super fun! Bananas make me happy for some reason (more pictures of all bananas will be coming soon). You could say I went totally bananas.

Here are some pictures from our last semester.

Half a mold of my banana.

A gilded banana! (24k gold)

The beginning of a banana painting.

Finished banana with painted marble.

We learned how to build frames and lay different imitation leafs. Here are two tests with brass and oxidized brass.

Close-up of another frame I made. Here with oxidized copper. (How beautiful isn't oxidized copper?)

Experiment with oxidized brass and copper on plaster eggs.

A first sketch of a project in shadow technique.

Finished result painted with pigment and oil.

We learned how to spray paint with spray gun. Here I freshened up an old child chair.

This is what it looked like before. Worn and old.

This is how it turned out afterwards. With the help of a little sandpaper, primer and a swing in the spray box. All old brush strokes and worn edges are gone and now it has a really durable and shiny surface. As new!

Glass gilding. Here, a foundation is laid with white gold on glass (when it's finished, it will look like mirror glass).

Drew a little blackbird on the back with a scalpel.

And on this glass I scraped out a pattern in 24k gold.

My little workbench with various eggs, bananas, frames, moldings and stained glass.

Homemade frame with golden eggs and stained glass in white gold and gold.

I will really miss spendning time at that bench! But all the fun doesn't end here!

Next week I will go to Stockholm and do my first internship with the decorative painters Alexander and Veronica (www.dekorationsmalarna.se). They are crazy talented at decorative painting! I'm so incredibly thrilled about joining them at their work for a couple of weeks! Feel free to follow me on instagram where I will share some glimpses from my practice there and all the cool stuff that they make. Hope to see you there! :)