Studio Snippet takes over: Specific details on chasing a small section of a vessel

The studio snippet is taking over again! Over on my FaceBook page someone was asking for more detail about how I’m going about chasing in some shell-like forms on a piece in progress I shared. As I set about doing that I realized it was going to be a bit more of an involved effort than I normally put into such posts, since anything on FaceBook is essentially a flash in the pan, all but forgotten in a couple days. As this information might be something of perennial interest to at least a few people I thought I’d post it here instead. However, it is likely not of much interest to most people as it’s kinda technical geeky stuff about the metalsmithing technique known as chasing. Perhaps you non-chasers will find some interest in getting a deeper understanding of just what goes into such work, but you might also just want to skip this post.

Let me also say upfront I don’t really intend this to be a tutorial exactly. I’m not going to talk broadly about how to chase metal. I do that in the workshops I teach, and it feels like a broader topic than I want to tackle in a post. Instead what I’m going to do is go though each little step and tool I’m using to chase in a “shell” section on this piece I’m currently working on. If you already know something about chasing then it might be of interest to see what tools I’m using and how I go about building the volume and forms.

So where we are starting for this post is a couple courses into the chasing work. I had already laid out and chased in the larger partial circle type shapes. That took two rounds of lining and pushing back the broad planes to sculpt it into the initial series of plateaus. I’ve also already chased in the shell-like shapes on many of these sections. What I’m going to go over is the various tools I’m using as I develop just one small section. This is what I repeat over and over for each section.

Initially I am redrawing in pencil the edge line I want to chase first. I had laid this out in pencil and then more firmly established it with a micro-burnisher, sort of polishing in a line I can barely see after the pencil inevitably get rubbed off during work. I redraw just this small section so I can see it to chase the line. I don’t bother with redrawing any more lines right now because they would get rubbed away before I’m ready to hammer them in.

In the following images I will be holding the tool I used to hammer in the changes you see from one shot to the next. So in this next image I’ve used what I call my “narrow liner” from the basic set of tools I have for students in my chasing workshops. This tool allows me to make what is basically a narrow trough with sides that are more or less straight upright. I think of the cross section profile from this tool as being shaped like a “U”, but with the bottom section squared off instead of rounded.

Because I want one side of this line to be pushed down I’m next using my small square flatter, again those who have taken a chasing workshop with me will recognize this from the set we use. I’m using the small square because it’s a good shape for me to get into the sorts of curves I have in this piece. I work it on an angle to hit just the one side of the trough the previous tool made. I only want to push one side down. This makes the other side appear higher, starting my sculpting of depth.

After the small square has gotten the initial edges down and pushed away some I have the space to go in with my large square flatter, again from the tool set. This is the tool I use the most in all my work. It’s the one that really sculpts and shapes the broad planes. At this point I’m going to use it to shape that edge section a bit more, rounding the edge down some.

The previous tools have limitations to how sharp and tight they can get the corner sections. Generally I use other tools to really crisp these zones up. In this case I’m using my broadest corner tucking tool. This is a tool that I haven’t included in the workshop sets, since I was trying to keep those sets minimal. It is essentially a triangle with only one point high and the rest rounded back. This allows all the force of the hammer to be initially focused on just the one point, really pushing a corner down. As the tool sinks deeper into the metal more and more of its surface comes into contact, dispersing the force of the hammer blow more. I have made these tools in a range of different angles of triangle to fit different corners. The danger with them is that it’s relatively easy to break through if you aren’t paying attention since they focus all the force into stretching the metal in a very tiny area.

The corner tucking tool is pretty sharp. It almost always leaves little marks and uneven surfaces that I want to clean up. To do this I moved onto a small, sharp rhombus flatter. I have these tools in various shapes from different triangles to rectangles, to ovals, and circles. They have crisp sides that let me get in tight to the edges I’m making on the vessel, but because they are so crisp and sharp I have to be very attentive to the exact angle I’m holding them at if I want to flatten and smooth out a section. If my angle is off then I’ll end up hammering in sharp lines from the sharp edges. I used this rhombus tool because it best fits into the corner spaces I’m trying to clean up.

I don’t use the small sharp flatter tools over large areas because it is way too easy to have my angles off and make unsightly marks. So as soon as I can I want to move back to my large square flatter, whose edges are all broken and rounded just a bit, making it a more forgiving tool to use. The downside is that it can’t get in as tight and close to an edge because of this rounding. Here I’m going back with it to blend out the rhombus sections finalizing the basic shape of this lower plateau edge section.

Next I’m ready to move into the “shell” section. I’m going to begin this with what I think of as a traditional liner tool. The end of it is essentially a “V” shape, and thus it hammers in a “V” shaped trough. This is establishing the lines I want to push down.

I tend to tackle each side of the “V” trough in turn. First I go in with what I call my “fat liner” in the basic workshop set. I’m using this to just get started in pushing the edge down and back a bit more. This tool is fairly crisp on the two long parallel sides, thus allowing me to get in fairly close and tight on these sides.

After the fat liner has sculpted my edge back far enough I can switch over to the large square flatter again to further push and sculpt the planes back, rounding them over toward the middle of each little section. If you haven’t noticed already, this is the tool I without a doubt spend the most time with.

After having worked just one side down the effect is more of one side of each scalloped section overlapping the other. That’s not what I want for this piece. Rather I want it to look like each side arches down to a lower line that is separating the two parts rather than having one appear on top of the other. So I need to work the other side of my “V” line like I did the first side. I’m returning to the fat liner to push that edge back a bit as before. Granted I could have done both sides of the line at the same time, but in terms of time efficiency I find it better to do all one side first then do the other. This greatly reduces the number of times I need to fully rotate the piece around to get the right tool angle on the other side.

Next, as you may have guessed, I return to the large square flatter to sculpt this side of the line out. This time I’m taking more care to see that the overall curve of each scallop section flows well.

Finally I thought that for this step by step illustration I should finish with the little bit of texturing I plan to do on this piece. In order to provide a bit more visual separation between the edge sections and the “shell” section I am going to use a dot tool to stipple in a texture on the edge.

I’ll repeat all these steps for each little section of the vessel until done. Hopefully this helps fellow chasers understand a bit more how I develop my forms, and helps everyone else better appreciate what goes into such work. Naturally each sort of design can require a different approach and tools, but these are the basics. I establish a line, start pushing back the planes to sculpt it some, usually crisp up some corners, then finish sculpting back the planes to develop the form, and add any textures. It can be a slow, meticulous process, but the results can be magical when you think of where it started and how it was essentially formed just by hammering. So here again is a photo of the piece after I’ve finished all the chasing work.

I’m happy to have a site where I can again allow comments. (I had to shut them off on my main website because the spam was simply uncontrollable!) So please I encourage you to share thoughts of your own. My general rule about comments though is just to play nice. Differing views are fine, but I’m not interested in engaging in or moderating verbal fights. If I feel things get out of hand, by whatever criteria I decide, I’ll just start blocking or deleting things.