Learning the skills and art of Chasing and Repousse.
What is Chasing and Repousse? Chasing is creating art from strategically hitting the front side trying to form the design you want. Repousse is the same thing except from the backside. Possible to use just one or the other. When using them both it creates something of a 3D look.
I will go over what we have been working on since late July. In a bit of pictures with light descriptions down below. This is a whole knew experience for me. It has shown me that it is very time consuming, the end results can be quite stunning. Practice,practice, practice is going to be the them for me.
This is my pitch bowl. It is quite large. First thing we had to do is fill it full of pitch.
We well take this hard resin looking material and place it in a teapot with a small can surrounded by boiling water then turn the pitch from a solid form to a liquid form.
As you can see it looks like black tar and kinda smells like it too. Takes a while to melt the pieces down so we have to do it small amounts at a time. We did it on one of the few beautiful days we had. It got pretty warm.
Finished after multiple hours. Now we let it cool over night while being careful not to spill it.
Tools of the trade
Along with a pitch bowl a couple light weight jeweler hammers of different weight is needed. Next you can find a big variety of tools for this trade. What I am using is a variety of small round dapping tools to a variety of liner tools. Some resemble the tip of a hatchet.
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First task is placing a small piece of copper in the pitch bowl then trying to pound out a round circle and also make a straight line. Sounded easy enough but proved to be challenging. Would think my tool is in one spot and hit it then find out my tip wasn’t where I thought it was. Reminds me of a fish in water. You think it is right in front of you, but the water throws your eyes off and it is really just a few inches up from the point your brain sees.
Next is a fun task. I design my own Tin’aa. Hand cut it out and file it clean. Then scribe in line where I will bound it out from the back side. This is the Reprousse part. So in order to do this we put the face in the pitch. Both side have the scribing put on s when we flip it we can see what’s been done.
Here is a example of using a liner to to put the line to make a clean pop out form on the other side.I will do this until the T is clearly identified.
After the T is in I pound out the top part of the shield giving it a great deal of character. Pop it out and clean the face of all the tar which is a dirty time consuming process only to realize I need to put it back and clean all the bumps up.
Once I clean all the bumps up by pounding on the back side I clean the face of the pitch and flip it over.Now is time for hammering the face and pushing parts down from the front which is called chasing. Since part of it is pushed out we need to fill that part up with pitch before laying it down.
Many cleaning and clippings over later I am done hammering out my Tin’aa
Take it home and clean it up then finish it off by a heat treatment. A technique of taking a torch and lightly hitting it until it starts changing colors then abruptly stoping.
We worked on more but I will leave it at this. Thanks for hanging out with me and reading on my journey. Until next time
Rob