Leather Sculptures Travel Hot Plates Ochre Hurdy
Today on "how it's made"... The use of leather as an artist medium dates back to the middle ages, when it was crafted into fierce animal shapes that were then affixed to battle helmets. Fast-forward several centuries, and some artists are rediscovering leather as a sculpting material and redefining the art of sculpture. This is leather reimagined. In this studio, cowhides become art instead of a sofa or a pair of shoes. It's artistry over utility. The artist starts by developing a pattern. He draws imagery within a paper fish shape. It represents the life cycle of a rainbow trout. He places the pattern on a cowhide, and using a scriber, he lightly etches the fish shape into the leather. Using a razor blade, he follows the etched lines to cut out the fish shape. He dampens the entire piece with a wet cloth. This softens the leather to prepare it for the drawings on the pattern, which will be transferred to it. He places the pattern on the dampened leather double. Using a round-tip tool, he traces the drawings. The tool makes light impressions on the supple leather. Following those lines with a swivel knife, he carves the imagery into the leather. When the leather starts to dry, he redampens it. Then, with a wedge tool and mallet, he depresses the leather around the main artwork. This raises the images above the background. He hammers a disc-tip tool into the leather to make a fish-eye indentation. Then, using an actual stone, he lightly pounds the rocks in the image. This transfers the stone's texture to the leather. He also uses the rock to create shading on the trout and the foliage. For the fish-scale detail, he pounds a tool with a crescent-shaped tip into the leather. He works in a linear fashion, row on row, to punch tight scales across much of the art. This creates a textural symmetry throughout the piece. Turning to a second matching fish shape, he shaves leather from the back of the fins to give them a lighter, more realistic look. He applies glue to the edges. This plain fish shape will serve as the back of the sculpture. He applies more fins to the glued areas in the underbelly of the fish art. He then brings the two sides of the fish together and glues them, leaving the bottom fins and the mouth open. Using an industrial sewing machine for leather, he stitches the fish together with heavy nylon thread. This fish art is now ready to go from flat to 3d. He stuffs polyester fill into it. The leather has been moistened again so that, when it dries, it will shrink tight to the filling. As he stuffs the leather, he uses a wooden rod to distribute the filling. He then glues a carved leather fish mask onto the face. This adds drama to the piece. He trims the mask. Then he applies a rainbow of color to the trout, beginning with a silvery shade of white. He paints an olive-green shade on the top of the fish sculpture and a pinkish-red hue in the middle. This reflects the colors of the rainbow trout. He dabs black paint on the fish sculpture to replicate the spots normally found on trout. He then marks the fish sculpture extensively with silvery white speckles. He defines some of the etched lines with the same paint to make the imagery bolder. The artist signs the leather fish. Making the entire leather sculpture takes over a month. Now it's ready for public viewing. With a travel hot plate, who needs room service? Just unpack this single-burner appliance and plug it into an electrical outlet in the hotel room. It can be used to warm up soup, fry eggs or make espresso. It's economical and convenient, no tips necessary. A travel hot plate offers another way to eat on the road. Travelers can whip up something to eat pretty much anywhere there is an electrical outlet. Production starts with steel wire for the heating element. The wire unwinds and travels over rollers. The rollers keep the wire at an even tension as machinery pulls it forward. The machinery winds the wire around a mandrel to produce a tight coil. A blade then chops the coil to the correct length. Each coil will serve as a heating element. A worker slides the coils' ends onto hooks attached to a fixture. The fixture revolves and meets up with an automated welder, which fuses the hook to the heating coil. It welds one hook to each end of the coil. To demonstrate the coil's heating capacity, a technician connects it to an electrical source, and it very quickly becomes so hot it glows. A worker is now ready to install the coil in the cast-iron burner. Robots pick up the burners using magnetic power and transfer them to a conveyor system. The conveyor pushes the burners forward. In the meantime, a worker threads the coil between posts in an applicator head. This puts the coil in the correct configuration. An automated system then moves the applicator head forward on the production line. A vibrating device applies 16 1/2 tons of pressure to pack an insulating compound into the cast-iron burners. This compound is made of talcum, magnesite, water, and other ingredients. The applicator head embeds the heating coil within the insulation, allowing the hooks to protrude. This isolates the coil from the cast-iron burner to prevent short circuits. A worker coats each burner with a rustproofing varnish. The burners bake at a temperature of 212 degrees fahrenheit for 12 hours. This dries the varnish and hardens the insulation in the burners. Out of the oven, a worker welds wires to the protruding hooks, which will connect to a thermostat later. She attaches ceramic sleeves to the wires for electrical insulation. She then spot-welds metal connectors to the ends of the wires. She installs an intermediate backplate through which the insulated connectors protrude, and screws the backplate in place. Another worker installs the cover plate with numerous holes to vent heat from the burner. She screws a threaded bolt into the hot plate and attaches a ground wire to the center screw. She slides the thermostat onto the threaded bolt and secures the ground wire. She adjusts the position of the thermostat and connects the wires. She now attaches a plastic base and screws a temperature knob into it. She joins the wires to a power cord and stabilizes the connection with a plastic clamp and cover. She installs a metal plate over the exposed wires to encase them within the base structure. She slides rubber feet onto the nubs in the plastic base and applies a label with all the technical details. Using a probe, she confirms that the hot plate is functional, that there is no current leakage and the wiring is properly isolated from the cast-iron burner. A technician brings water to a boil on a randomly selected hot plate and measures the temperature to confirm it heats water consistently. He also aims an infrared camera at the hot burner. The image proves that heat is evenly disseminated across the surface. Once it passes all these tests, this travel hot plate is ready to hit the road. It should provide the means to cook food wherever in the world it happens to land. Ocher is the original earth tone because it's actually colored earth, yellow, orange, red or brown, depending on its specific mineral composition. Humans have used ocher as a pigment since prehistoric times and still use it today to tint paint, plaster, and other materials. From prehistoric cave paintings to renaissance frescoes, the natural hues of ocher endure to this day. The natural color of ocher depends on the amount and type of iron oxide it contains. Yellow ocher can also be baked to a shade of red. There was a time when men mined ocher ore underground with picks and shovels. Today the old mines are a tourist attraction in roussillon and gargas in the provence region of france, home of the world's largest ocher deposits and where the industrial process for making ocher pigment was invented in the late 1700s. Today at the last active mine in gargas, france, workers quarry-mine ocher using heavy machinery rather than manual tools. The ocher ore contains about 10% pure ocher. The rest is stones and sand, which is why the ore requires processing. The first step is to wash it. This turns it into liquid unrefined ocher. Next the liquid flows through sieves. Then the liquid ocher flows into troughs leading to a collection basin. Pumps transfer the liquid ocher at high pressure to the separator, which spins it at high speed. The centrifugal force separates the sand. The pure liquid ocher is pumped to drying tanks. Over several months, the ocher gradually settles to the bottom. Workers drain the water, then collect the coarse ocher powder that remains. Traditional processing machinery is on display at the old ocher factory in roussillon, france. The crusher would reduce blocks of ore into fist-sized pieces for the mill to grind. The ground ore would then drop through three consecutive sieves, which allowed only fine ocher powder to pass through, and collect in a barrel below. At this modern factory, this mill grinds the coarse ocher powder until the particles are no more than 30 microns in size, the consistency of flour. To make red ocher, workers put yellow ocher in a gas-fired oven and bake it for 15 minutes at 1,380 degrees fahrenheit. The heat dehydrates the iron oxides, which turns the color to red. When an order comes into the factory, a worker releases the required amount of ocher from the storage silos to the packaging machine. This factory has packaging machines for several retail sizes. Ocher isn't merely a red or a yellow pigment. One can produce a wide range of colors by playing with the percentages of those two base colors as well as by adding other types of natural pigments. For centuries, artists have mixed ocher into oil and other media to make paint. This artist is making what's known as tempera. She cracks an egg, separates the white and sets aside the yolk to use. She drops a few spoonfuls of ocher on her palette. Then adds some stirred egg yolk to bind it. She mixes the ingredients thoroughly with her palette knife and crushes lumps with a mortar until the tempera is just the right smooth consistency to begin applying to her canvas. Another medium one can pigment with ocher is cheese. This is known as casein painting, casein being the milk protein that's a major component of cheese. It must be fresh fat-free white cheese. And an artist mixes it with lime to make it water-soluble. Casein paint resembles oil paint once dry. However, it's inflexible and too brittle to use on canvas, so it's suitable only for rigid surfaces such as artist board, furniture, woodwork, and walls. Ocher can also pigment plaster, concrete, ceramic, and other construction materials for an authentic earth-tone palette that only nature can create. A hurdy-gurdy is a stringed musical instrument with a unique sound. To play it, musicians do two thubgs simultaneously-- turn a crank and play a keyboard. The crank turns a wheel that rubs against the strings like a violin bow. The keys press on the strings, changing their pitch. This french hurdy-gurdy maker specializes in restoring antiques like this instrument crafted in 1918 and this very damaged gem from 1882. The artisan carves new support struts using the original ones as templates. The struts are curved outward, making the soundboard convex. He uses spruce because it's a lightweight wood which vibrates well to conduct sound. Constructing a different instrument now, he runs a strip of maple through a sander to reduce the thickness to less than a tenth of an inch. This will become the two ribs which form the sides of this instrument. He cuts the strip in half and marks the direction of the wood grain, so he can butt the ribs in mirror image. He dampens each rib with water and runs it against a hot iron. This steams a curve into the wood. He repeats this process again and again until the curve fits a wooden form that's the exact shape of the instrument. He clamps both ribs to the form and lets them set for a full week. French hurdy-gurdies are traditionally guitar-shaped or lute-shaped. To construct a new lute-shaped body, the artisan removes the ribs from the antique instrument he's restoring, traces each one onto a strip of maple, then cuts out the shape with a band saw. He constructs a lute-shaped wooden form, then uses the hot iron to curve the new ribs to the shape of the form. This instrument has nine ribs. He alternates between maple and pearwood. He tapes the ribs together and lets them set for a week. This hurdy-gurdy was made in 1741. The original crank-driven wheel rubbed against the strings to produce sound like a violin bow. The wheel is all warped now, so he crafts a new one, on a lathe, out of pearwood. The keyboard's black keys are made of ebony wood. He cuts the basic shape with a small circular saw. Then he refines the dimensions with a small router. These new keys are part of the restoration of this 1893 instrument. He lightly files the original key-box slots so that the new keys will insert smoothly. The bottom row has 13 black keys, the top row, 10 black keys with white tops made of bone. Just below the key box, the top third of the wheel sticks out through a slot in the soundboard. And just below that is this component, the main bridge. The artisan traces a template on a block of maple, drills an access hole for his fine marquetry saw, then cuts it out. The main bridge props up the instrument's two main melody strings. He checks the height and shaves off excess wood with a small plane. He'll stain the bridge to match the rest of the instrument and glue it onto the soundboard. This hurdy-gurdy has new keys and a new wheel-and-crank mechanism. He installs new strings, starting with the two melody strings. Attached to a tailpiece at the bottom, they pass over the bridge, the wheel and through the key box, wrapping around new steel tuning pegs at the top. This restoration also requires new tangents, two wedges of maple set into each key. Playing a key presses the tangents against the strings. The artisan installs four more strings which hit the sides of the wheel, pass over smaller bridges and attach to the bottom of the instrument. They make a buzzing background sound, so they're called drone strings.