So, this is where I got to at the end of day 5. The top work was my work in progress when we downed tools at 4:30pm, so it’s lacking a pin and catch (and also hidden is that the middle piece isn’t soldered on… yet.) The other two are wearable, and in fact the bottom one I was wearing at the pub afterward, despite its soldering-induced softness making it still a little too flexible to withstand wear unscathed.
They lack finishing – I’d like to blacken them and highlight the texture on them. They were all roll printed before blanking, and I sand blasted the middle one (mostly to harden it), so it would be interesting to see how each piece reacts to the colouring.
As a way to speedily prepare metal for work, blanking process has a bit fat tick. Its other strength is as a process for playing with design ideas in metal. My usual process is drawing based, with which I play with combinations of lines and forms in AutoCad. The benefit of this (that is, the blanking) process is that you could take a line, or a form, and stamp it directly into metal, and play with it in actual tactile pieces, rather than with the simpler (and two dimensional) representations of such pieces.