I spent a good 3 hours putting copper leaf on the magnifying glass-motif frame today. It took a long time to weed off unwanted leaf from all of the holes.   It’s a bit too shiny right now – I’ll let it tarnish for a few days before sealing it.

I am working out what the image/text will be behind the glass. Some candidates in no particular order:

1. Look around you
2. Look at the big picture
3. I was framed
4. Image of the Mandelbrot Set (The frame is a fractal of the magnifying glass that will be in front of it).  Too subtle? Geeky?

I have some tiny little plastic magnifying lenses that I could place behind each hole in  the frame.  I think I will make another piece similar (and simpler) to this one that uses them.  I like the idea – maybe one word per hole, but I think it would be too busy in this piece.  Plus, I would need something that would be the correct focal distance from the wall. I’m going to TechShop tomorrow and will do some design and prototyping.

I realize that I haven’t yet uploaded an image of the new “Ceci n’est pas Ceci n’est pas une pipe” piece (in progress) that I worked on a few weeks back (and is the origin of my current copper fetish), and the first of the series that I mostly made at TechShop.

The frame is made of copper pipe (pipe cutters are cool!) and joints.  The signature of Rene Magritte is repeated around the pipes.  The photo doesn’t do it justice.  What I did first was polish the pipes nice and shiny.  Then I converted an image of his signature to vectors, cut it out on a vinyl cutter, and then weeded off several copies of both the positive or negative (which took forever as I was approaching the limits of the vinyl cutter’s minimum resolution).  I attached the vinyl to the pipes and sand blasted them, then peeled off the vinyl.  It looked great, but after handling it, it got tarnished badly, so I needed to polish it up again and coat with lacquer. The lacquer takes away a bit of the luster, unfortunately.

I still need to attach an appropriate magnifying glass whose frame I would like to form out of more pipe.  Wide diameter copper pipe is not easy to acquire – plus I only need a sliver.  I think I’ll just wrap a thin band of copper sheet around and do some metalworking to make it hold a lens and have it attached to a pipe handle.

I’m still undecided as how to display the image.  Current idea is to have a branch coming down from the top of the frame to the center with an elbow joint pointing a small stub forward at the focal point. The stub will have the text, possibly engraved.

Lastly, here is the first piece that I completed in this 2.0 version of the Magnifying Glass series:

Jeweler's Loupe

There is a jeweler’s loupe stuck to the frame (sticks out about 2cm).  The lenses are splayed out to form a reclining female form.   I’m assuming the viewer will read left to right.  The upper-left (and smaller) one says “This will get you a wife”.  The lower-right (and bigger) one says “This will get you a hot one”

The frame is faux-diamond encrusted.