See, I have a deal with myself. We have always had a pretty small budget for indulgences here. Kids, school, house, life happens… you know the drill. So for me to have money for my hobby, I make it autonomous. Art money buys art tools.
So! My new cleaver, having been bought with art monies, must therefore be an art tool.
Muahahaha!
Suggestions? How shall I employ this chunk of metal and wood in making art?
You can pretty easily get your hands on some ferric chloride. Paint the cleaver with an etch resist pen available almost anywhere for about 6 bucks. Remember that this will be a negative image. Now in a well-ventilated area wearing rubber gloves use cotton swabs to rub the ferric chloride onto the blade. When you have arrived at the desired texture rinse everything with distilled water clean off your acid resist and your Cleaver is now a work of art. I know this was not your question but it is an answer LOL.
I would not have thought of this! I love this idea. Now, to figure out what to draw on it!
By the same token you could coat the cleaver and sketch by scratching through the coating… then use some copper (or silver/gold/etc) wire and a DC current to plate the steel where the coating is removed.
Combining both etching and plating could have amazing results.
You can get ferric chloride, etch resist film, and/or an etch resist pen as part of a circuit board etching kit on Ebay/Amazon, fairly inexpensively.
If you want to watch a *master* at that sort of thing, YT has a bunch of videos by various folks, but my favorite is “Clickspring” where he’s etching things like clock face numerals and such.
Use it in making cooking videos. Movies are art. Hence, art tool.
This is what catalyzed buying this beast – trying to use the pretty, but light, cleaver my son gave me a few years ago. I was so frustrated with that – and I worried my viewers! – that I followed a link a friend sent me and bought this beautiful beast.