thank you sam.ray is one of my greatest inspirations,his thinking box is a bit bigger than mine.nice to get to know a bit more of him.if only a bit of the magic can rub of on me.ray you mentioned 14k green gold,do you mix it up yourself and if not do you know what goes in to the mix to make it green?
The basic formula for 14K green gold is......fine gold-1.0gm.,fine silver-0.474gm,copper-0.236gm for a total weight of 1.71grams. most of the major suppliers have slight differences in their alloys,so it is usually good to use material from one supplier or other karat fineness to achive the color you are looking for.
Thank you Ray for sharing your great job, they are realy impressive. When you prepare your design, do you paint the art work first and choose the material, like green gold, yellow gold and copper etc?
I usually buy my yellow gold in ingot form adn roll it myself. but when I have need of something special like the green gold I call Hauser&Miller a local refinery and get that stuff from them.
Here is the ink and watercolor drawing from my sketchbook that I used to plan out the Koi engraving.
Ray; do you find that a detailed painted drawing helps you envision what you want to do? Or does a drawing of this nature serve more of a purpose for the customer to envision. Such a detailed drawing sure could keep you out of hot water when the job is done, at least you could say I told you so right here in the drawing.
Mike
I do such drawings for exactly both those reasons.
I tend to be a very random right brained person with ADD tendancies. Because of that, the designs in my head are in constant flux and continually changing. Because of that, I have found that for me to accomplish anything in life I have to drive stakes into the ground and tie off to them to keep to the task.
When I have a drawing like this it serves as my stake. It becomes sort of the blueprint for what I am trying to do. It helps me keep my plan in mind and keeps it constant. I do allow myself to make minor changes and improvements as I cut but not to the extent I would if I just let myself go with no reference to work from.
I do the same thing when teaching a class. I have daily agendas and outlines I work from to keep me on the desired track. Folks whose minds work in random fashion really do need to be list makers.
The other benefit is that the customer has a very good idea of what he/she will get and there are no supprises. This helps keep everyone happy. Part of the cost of my work is for the time I spend doing these drawings. The design is part of the job and the customer is charged for that as part of the total cost of the engraving job.
thanks danm,one more question is what makes the green in the gold is it the copper or the silver.the mix sounds like it would not produse green gold(yello,red and white).i can not see clearly from the picture how green the gold really is.is there other colors that can be made?
Gold can be made to look like many colors including blue,purple,and black.for green gold fine silver is the material that tones 24k gold to appear a greenish color. link to more gold color info.
