I have more 6×10″ blanks, so looking for more tall designs. Gonna try my hand at making copper pitcher plant pictures. Let’s begin!
I start on the computer with creating the design from a stock photo. Hard to find a good one that is from a photo, but found a few sketches to employ. I cut out the pitcher plant and reduce the image down to 4 colours in Inkscape.
Spent a lot of time tracing and cleaning up lines to remove unnecessary zigzags and ensure that there were no points where more than 2 colours touch together. Think of a target with concentric rings, then picture that the target isn’t round, but has the outline of the pitcher plant, for a basic idea of what is do – each colour layer needs to be fully contained in the layer below it. I do this to make it possible to convert the design to monochrome because that’s what the cutting machine software needs to properly interpret the cut lines.
With the stencils cut into vinyl and the copper blanks prepared, it’s time to align each stencil on a plate and transfer it to the copper surface with transfer tape. I may try using paint in future pitcher plants, but for now, for this pair of plants, I want to try using only chemical patinas. I weed the backgrounds of each image, apply chemicals, seal them in the container, and let them react. Afterwards I rinse them, dry, them, and seal them with clear coat.
Next I weed all the dark parts of each pitcher plant, flood the exposed copper with liquid chemicals, and let react in the chamber. I hope they turn nearly black, but dark brown will do, too. They both got a bit of blue in the dark parts, but I decide to go with it. Rinsed them, let them dry, and clear coated.
Same procedure for the light brown, pink, and bare copper highlights for each plant: weed the parts, add chemicals, react in chamber, rinse, dry, and seal. The exception is the bare copper – just weed away the vinyl and seal without any chemical reaction. Depending on the roughness/topography of the patina, I may do an extra finish coat of clear to ensure it gets sealed properly.
I’ve done several pitcher plants since the first pair, making slight adjustments to the stencil design to avoid some tricky spots, and varying-up the colours and backgrounds. Ha, I still have not tried making one with paint.
