"Contentment #437" - A figurative piece from start to finish

People, myself included, often seem confused or bewildered when I tell them that my figurative pieces were hammered from a flat sheet of copper. The mind seems to have a hard time grasping just how this could be done. We've all heard that metal, particularly copper, is malleable, but just what does that mean? In this section I intend to visually demonstrate just how malleable copper is and how step by step a flat sheet can become a three-dimensional human figure. With this piece, Contentment #437, I shot an image at the beginning of every course. I'm defining a course as a period of hammering between annealings. Annealing is the process of heating and quenching the metal to get it back to a softened state (see the "David Huang at work" section). I'm sharing this with you, though honestly, I've always wanted to see all the stages laid out for myself.

I have to put a huge thanks out to Fred Zweig for the survival of this series. When my website was accidentally fried into oblivion I was unable to fully recover all the images from this series. However, Fred had downloaded a copy to his computer previously and upon learning of my plight was able to get the entire series to me to restore to the website.

Fred is a fellow metalsmith whose work and goings on you can catch on his blog, http://fredz49.blogspot.com/.

You can also see a piece commissioned for his 30th wedding anniversary, Whorled Flow #638, being created in the same step by step photographic series here.

Again, a big thanks to Fred!!