Brass "Fireball" hanging wall sculpture

Make a three-foot square wall sculpture out of four independently-hung brass pieces. (This project is also posted at docbug.com.)

Step 1 Intro

Shortly after I moved into my new house I was thinking about artwork for my walls and all of a sudden I had a vision of a sort of Van Goghesque fireball made out of brass or bronze as a wall hanging. It's been a long time coming and the piece has evolved from my first vision, but I'm quite pleased how it turned out. Here you can see the finished sculpture, with my hat in the second picture to provide some scale. The three larger pieces are mounted between one and two inches out from the wall, which gives the piece some depth and causes shadows when the morning light hits the wall.

Comments

[oakironworker]

The metal reminds me of bi-metal strips I use in class to explain linear expansion. It would be cool to use some of that. then the sculpture would change as the temp in the house changed great project

[inquisitive]

Oh I love this....simple and elegant-hey and thanks for all the patinaion comments! Great project!

[Artyst-y-kul]

Actually you can use brass, copper, or even bronze if you wanted it really fancy and you can chemically patinate any of those metals should you desire to do so.

You can get more info about how to @ http://sculptnouveau.com/ (this guy has written textbooks on patination and knows his stuff, I have used his products before and they work great and are easy to use, inexpensive) No affiliation I just really liked this sites info/products etc.

Cool project btw _{I think I am going to try it out.}

[Jafafa Hots]

If you want a different effect, make it out of copper and then apply Liver of Sulphur to "antique" it, rubbing some off in spots with steel wool for a good effect... spray on a laquer or varnish to keep the level of tarnishing where you want it without it geting worse... Liver of sulphur gives it a blackish effect. You can also get stuff to create a greenish or bluish patina, but that can take days or weeks to dry and have full effect, whereas live of sulphur just takes seconds. You can get liver of suphur and the other patina chemicals online at enasco.com, misterart.com, dickblick.com, etc... or locally at Michael's art supply stores. St. Louis Crafts sells the easiest to use stuff in little bottles.