This is Nemo -- my grand final piece for the semester. I had the most fun doing this piece. It's my favorite -- partly because it was more of an art piece and didn't have to be "practical" for wearing, lol.

The mask was inspired by the stones. I found the rock for these stones sitting in the scrap box in the art lab. When I cut into the stones, they just looked so..... spellbinding. They have several subtle shades of black, grey, blue, and green all mixed together to look like oil paints swirled around in a pan.

That's when I decided to call it Nemo, based loosely on the song by Nightwish. I wanted it to look like something sad and lost, without a past or identitiy -- yet, it is something complex and individual, even if it can't remember what it is. That's what I think of when I look at those stones -- complex and beautiful, but lost. (For those of you who don't know -- "Nemo" is Latin for "no one," which is the driving theme behind the song -- and my mask.) Also, when I hear the name "Nemo," I can't help but think of good old Captain Nemo. That's why I put the swirls and things in there; I wanted it to be reminiscent of a deep-sea creature. I wanted it to look like something that had been lost in the depths of the sea for so long that it had forgotten its name.

Unfortunately, with dark, opaque stones like that as the "eyes" of the mask, I wouldn't be able to see through it -- unless I made Nemo's eyes the false eyes. The real eye-holes are set down below, so that you can be called four-eyes and look cool at the same time, lol ^_^

The main piece of the mask is brass. Most of the overlays are copper, except for the two overlays surrounding the stone settings. I had to use a special extra-large saw frame to be able to cut out the swirlies around the sides, because the mask was too large for me to make the turns with a normal saw frame. The entire piece was formed. I wanted to form it more to fit the forehead a little better, but couldn't form it any further without making the bezels unusable. They barely hold the stones in as it is. The color was put on using a liver-of-sulfer patina (that's what gives the copper overlays their reddish look). I put a patina on because the stones have very dark, subtle colors, and the bright shiny brass and copper overhwhelmed them at first. The metal had to be "dimmed" in order for the details in the stones to be visible.

Now, the overlays surrounding the stones (the "eyes" of Nemo) are mokume. Mokume is an ancient Japanese metalsmithing technique. It involves taking two or three different colors of metal (I used nickel, brass, and copper) and sweat-sottering them together into a "metal sandwich." Then these layers are rolled out thin through a rolling mill. This flattened piece is then cut in half, and the two halves are sweat-sottered together. This stacking and flattening process is repeated several times until you have at least 24 layers of metal. Then, the metal is dented from the back in any pattern you wish. This disturbs the thin layers of metal, pushing some closer to the surface than others. The "bumps" on the front side are then sanded or filed off. Once sanded, you can see the mixing of the metals. It almost looks like the different colors of metal were melted and swirled around. That's the kind of metal I wanted around Nemo's eyes. Unfortunately, after all that work, the mokume didn't really stand out as much as I wanted it to. I had been hoping that the mokume would really make Nemo's eyes stand out more, but it seemed to fade into the background -_- Live and learn, I guess.

*****Update 1-18-08*****
I finally got those high-quality pics I was talking about from my art teacher ^_^ so I hope you enjoy the picture quality! Because of the way the mask was designed, it's not too sturdy on the bottom, so she had to turn it upside down to take the picture..... and I turned it right-side-up in my computer (just in case you were wondering about the upside-down shadows, lol)

If you want to see the original resolution picture (which is really really big), go here