The techniques of repoussé date from Antiquity and have been used widely with gold and silver for fine detailed work and with copper, tin, and bronze for larger sculptures. Among the most famous classical pieces using this technique are the bronze Greek armour plates from the 3rd century BC.
During the 3rd millennium BC, in the Middle East, a variety of semi-mass production methods were introduced to avoid repetitive free-hand work. With the simplest technique, sheet gold could be pressed into designs carved in intaglio in stone, bone, metal or even materials such as jet. The gold could be worked into the designs with wood tools or, more commonly, by hammering a wax or lead “force” over it.
The alternative to pressing gold sheet into a die is to work it over a design in cameo relief. Here the detail would be greater on the back of the final design, so some final chasing from the front was often carried out to sharpen the detail.
The use of patterned punches dates back to the first half of the 2nd millennium BC, if not far earlier. The simplest patterned punches were produced by loops or scrolls of wire. By Hellenistic times, combined punches and dies were in use. In 1400 BC, the Egyptian Amarna period, resin and mud for repoussé backing was in use.
In 400 BC, the Greeks were using Beeswax for filler in repoussé.
Repoussé copper S.E.C.C. Headresses.
Repoussé and chasing are commonly used in India to create objects such as water vessels. These vessels are generally made using sheets of copper or silver.
During the Hopewell and Mississippian periods of the American Southeast and Midwest goods of repoussé copper were fashioned as ritual regalia and eventually used in prestige burials.
Examples have been found with many S.E.C.C. designs such as Bi-lobed arrow motif headdresses and falcon dancer plaques. Although examples have been found in a widely scattered area (Spiro, Oklahoma, Etowah, Georgia, and Moundville, Alabama), most are in what is known as the Braden Style, thought to have originated at the Cahokia Site in Collinsville, Illinois.
Now you know what repoussé jewellery is and the tools it requires, it’s time to talk you through the chasing and repoussé technique itself. Just follow the steps below to get going:
1) Make your pitch. The first step in the chasing and repoussé process is to prepare your pitch. Use a heat gun, hand torch or powerful hairdryer to heat up the pitch, before pouring or pressing it into a pitch bowl. As an alternative, you could use a leather cushion filled with sand or grit which should function like a standard pitch.
2) Prepare your design. Using either your pencil or marker pen, highlight the area on the front of the metal’s surface to indicate where it will be pushed out from the back. Once done, curl the corners of the sheet into the pitch to keep it steady.
3) Punch in the design. Next, use the blunt chisel punch to mark out the design. To do this, repeatedly strike the chisel with your chasing hammer until you have followed the whole line. Make sure you’re holding the chisel correctly too, at a slight angle with your thumb on one side and fingers on the other – touching either the pitch or the metal for further support.
Top tip! You’ll need to strike the very top of the chisel with the flat end of the hammer, gently enough to make a smooth line that will show on the other side of the metal.
4) Repoussé the metal. Take your repoussé hammer and punches, turn the metal over and hammer within the areas that you have just marked out. Is the metal too hard to mould? Quickly anneal your design, cool and then try again.
5) Prepare for chasing. Once you’ve repousséd the metal, remove it from the pitch and clean it before chasing. If there’s any pitch still left on the design, lay it on a soldering table and use a flame over it, then you should see the residual pitch flake off. Quench the metal by placing it in cold water until it relaxes.
6) Redraw the design. Using your pencil or marker pen, draw the outline of your design once more. When you’re done, add it to the pitch the same way as before, front side up. Now you’re ready for chasing.
7) Use your chasing tools. Make the repousséd areas really stand out by using your punches and chasing tools to push the metal further down, all along the lines you’ve drawn. Looking to add a pattern to the background? You can use marked punches at a right angle to the design to add more detail, just make sure you’re annealing every time you switch sides. This action will make the corners of the metal become slightly distorted, but this isn’t a problem as you’ll be cutting it away.
8) Finish off the piece. Once you’ve removed your work from the pitch, you’ll need to anneal it once more, followed by quenching. When it’s dry, put it on a metal flat plate with the design facing upwards, and use a large round punch to even out the sides. Then take a piercing saw and cut off the edges, before filing to finish. And you’re done!
Repoussé is the process of decorating with a blunt tool by raising the surface of the metal from the back, leaving the ornament in relief. Sheet metal can be punched, scored, scratched, formed, or hammered against a yielding surface. Chasing is similar, but is done from the front of the sheet. On fairly soft metal sheets such as gold-alloy, a design could be produced with a number of materials — bone, hardwood, metal, and stone.
Chasing has a long history of use in conjunction with cast forms, where steel punches were used to refine the form of a cast object. It is still an important part of that process. Repoussé was probably developed not simply as a decorative technique but because a contoured or corrugated form is considerably stronger than a flat one. This meant that a thinner gauge metal could be used, allowing larger objects or greater profit.
Repoussé, This relief process, sometimes called modeling, makes full use of the malleability of metal to push and pull it into relief. The first step is to draw the intended outline on the annealed metal sheet with permanent ink. This is then gone over, or traced, with a liner as the metal sits on pitch. This has the effect of starting the relief in that the sheet is no longer perfectly flat, but rather has a shallow contour. Perhaps more important, when the sheet if heated and removed from the pitch, it will be seen that the image has been transferred to the back.
Repoussé is the process of decorating with a blunt tool by raising the surface of the metal from the back, leaving the ornament in relief. Sheet metal can be punched, scored, scratched, formed, or hammered against a yielding surface. Chasing is similar, but is done from the front of the sheet. On fairly soft metal sheets such as gold-alloy, a design could be produced with a number of materials — bone, hardwood, metal, and stone.
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