These brightly colored animals come from Oaxaca Mexico. The method of working is called repousse. Repousse has been around for really long time. For centuries and centuries, different kinds of artworks have been made using this process. They use a heavy metal and then using a mallet and a pointed object, they actually cause areas to be dented and areas to pop out. For instance on this elephant, there’s areas—there’s little dots are going in and on the fish there’s little dots that are popping out. We’ll learn more about that as we start to work with the tooling foil.
To do this project, you’re actually going to need some tooling foil which looks like this, and at the store usually you’re going to find it in a package like this. This roll has 10 feet on it which will be more than enough, you can do lots of projects. You’ll need pencil and some sketch paper, a pad of newspaper, scissors, permanent markers to do the coloring part, to add the color the animals and a hot glue gun that we’ll use towards the end and that I’ll explain later when we get towards the end.
Okay, so I have a little sketch here, I wanted to do a pelican so I went online in the computer and found a picture and do a quick little sketch from it. That’s a good way to find images, it’s just to go in the internet and pick out something. You can print it out on your computer, on your printer or you can just sketch right there in front of the computer. So, I’ve got this little pelican and I want to enlarge him. So I’m going to go ahead and get started. I’ll put my little sketch away. And what I’m going to do next is roll out enough tooling foil to fit my pelican. Now, couple of warnings about tooling foil, it is very, very sharp like razor-sharp. So you really have to be careful when you’re cutting it out and when you’re handling it.
Some people I know actually take masking tape and they tape the edges so they don’t accidentally get cut by the sharp edges of the foil. And you’re going to carefully flatten it out, like so, and the neat part about this is that you really don’t need any tracing paper of any kind to do this because you’re actually going to trace right over your sketch. I’m going to put my pelican on top of the tolling foil and on top of the stack of newspaper. You have to have the newspaper under there because what you’re trying to do is get the foil to stretch a little bit. And if you draw right on top of the table, it’s not going to stretch at all. So the padding actually allows you to get the foil to stretch a little bit and dented. So what I’m going to do is just—I’m going trace right over my drawing, like so, so that it transfers.
Okay, now, we’re going to lift this up and I’m going to do one more tracing. I’m going to trace around this wing, a second time and do it separately over here because when I’m finished, what I want to do is make this wings stick out the way that the artist here has made the owl’s, claws, and the piece of tree stick out from the rest of the animal because it looks kind of fun when you’ve got that three-dimensional, you’ve got the relief sculpture and then you have actual—a deeper relief sculpture going on here. And I really like the way that looks, so that’s what we’re going to do here.
So I’m just going to move my tracing or my sketch over a little bit and I’m going to do the wing just a tab bigger so that when I put it down I can bend it a little bit and glue it and it will cover what’s underneath. Now, I can move this so you can see this better and I’m just going to go—now I’m going to draw directly on the tolling foil. You don’t need any fancy tools to work on this, a pencil is great and sometimes you may actually use the back side of the pencil, you can use the eraser. Some people like to use popsicle sticks but I think you can do with just about everything you need to do with just a pencil.
So now, you’re going to go over all this lines directly on the foil. Now, when I do these tooling foil animals, I like to put lot of textures on them and then add the color. I think the texture is one of the elements that is so neat about the tooling foil that you can get these, these really interesting textures that pop out and already dented. Now, we’ve outlined all the original lines directly on the foil and then I’m going to go ahead and do the extra wing. And then, I’m going to cut both of this out. Now, you have to be really careful when you’re cutting these out so that you don’t get cut by the scraps while you’re working. And then I’m going to put the wing aside.
Now, I find it’s easier to cut down some of this excess foil that’s all around here. So you see how I kind of tear it down a little bit so that you don’t have to wrestle with all this foil. So now, we can get into cutting the details. What you’re going to have to do instead of trying to cut it out all in one continuous cut where you keep moving your scissors around, you’re going to have to do it in little sections where you come from the outside of the foil towards the center. Now, we’re going to go ahead and start to do the texturing and popping out and pushing in. And I’m going to start by pushing the eye in and basically what I’m doing is just—it’s like you’re coloring in and you just keep going round and round and pushing down the foil with your pencil. And for some reason, if the foil tears, it really doesn’t matter, you just kind of push it together and it’s going to be fine.
Now, I’m going to flip this over because what I want to do is that the design that surrounds eye I want to push that out. There, you can see how the eye goes in and then the design around that is sticking out. And I think I’m also going to make this design here—I guess we’ll make that stick out. So I color in carefully back and forth and then if I turn it back on the front side, I’m going to do the same thing I did around the edge of the eye, the design around the eye to make it look like it’s popping out even more but pushing in right next to it. Now, you can see how—that’s starting to look sculpted.
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