Scott Pincus Design

It has been a while since I posted.  Simply put, I got a bit overwhelmed with the holiday season, a major art show, and trying to keep up with the internet.    Something had to give for a while, and the internet was the clear choice.    I needed to test how well things were working from my internet efforts without putting in any more time as it was anyways.   Staying on top of adding new content is difficult. But I do think it is important. 

This morning I was thinking about how do I promote the buy local, buy handmade concept  I believe most folks are aware of the buy local campaign that has been going on for years now, though they might need a little reminder at times.   

It is really hard to compete against the big mega corporations, and even harder on the web. They own it.   They did a good job to get there, but the little guy is lost in all the noise. 

What you are seeing here is a sprue with future jewelry designs still attached.  This is what things look like right after a cast.    The black is from the molten silver oxidizing at the surface right during casting.   It is very easily removed by soaking the pieces in a light acid bath, called a pickle, for about 5 minutes.   The pickle turns the above completly white.  Designs are then detached from the casting center sprue.  All traces of the sprue attachments and any possible mold parting lines are mechanically removed from the designs.  And then comes the work to turn the design into shiny metal.  I mostly use mass finishing techniques, and at times hand polishing to make the work shiny.

For those of you that follow my work closely you might have noticed one new design on the tree above.  Casting can fail often, as much as 20% failure per flask is not that uncommon, though this gets better with experience.   To insure that my new future masters are successful, I distribute them to as many different flask as possible in a casting session.  That way one flask might fail, and I might loose a master,  but I would still have a chance that others flask will still have successful casts.  

I have been at trying to create an internet presence for a bit over 30 days now.  It is a daunting exercise to say the least.   

After 30 days, Google has finally found my site and I believe characterized it with keywords correctly.  I submitted my site to Google on day one.  They did do a partial indexing from day one, but the keywords were all wonky; very wonky.  So I started to dig into my site, and do some research.   The wonky key words gave me a clue about how to set things right.  So about a week ago, I did some tweaking of wording on my pages, and titles, and lo and behold, things look great now.   

From what I can tell google still has not picked up everything, even still so more links and indexing are to be expected.

My silversmith studio is located in Volcano, Hawaii.   Hawaii lava flows have been getting lots of attention lately.   My friends and family have been asking questions about my safety of late, thanks for the concern.  All is well where I live.   Just a bit of background, I came to Hawaii on a job offer (geophysics/ software ) by the USGS (United States Geologic Survey).  I no longer work for them. The views express here are my own views and do not necessarily represent the views of the USGS. 

Puu o o, is the source vent for the current lava flow, The video above was taken a year ago when the lava was heading in a southern direction towards the sea.  Not the like the current lava flow which is heading East from the vent. 

Puu o o is about 10 miles south of my studio, and down hill.   The current lava flow is about 30 miles away, and down hill.  

So guess what is moving between me and the power station that provides power to where I live? You guessed it, hot molten lava. I lost power yesterday  for a brief time. I hope this does not become a real problem. I guess this is just one of those things you can expect to have happen when you live on a active Volcano in the middle of the Pacific. :)

One of my friends brought up a concern about  explosive volcanic events.  We do not have explosive lava here. Explosive lava is reserved primarily for continental margins. The last time we had explosive lava was over 300 years ago. And that was attributed to the main vent being sealed for 100's of years and long term contact with the ground water. The Puu o o vent has been open for over 30 years straight now. The longest known continuous lava flow in history. The main vent reopened in 2008. And it was not explosive either. But it put on quite the show.

Lava moves pretty slow as you can see in the video.  There is not much risk here of being covered by lava. That being said, this is mother nature. and the lava goddess, Pele has a mind of her own. We are probably more at risk due to earthquakes (continuous) and tsunamis on the island than lava. It has to be a pretty big wave for it to hit me at 4000 ft elevation. 

Lost wax casting is all about creating a negative space that poured molten silver can flow into. The process of casting is pretty straight forward and incredibly fun to do.  Copies of designs are made from liquid wax injected into a molds. Then the cool, hardened wax copies are attached to a wax sprue (blue in photo above).  The purpose of the sprue is help channel and feed the poured molten silver into the copies.  This is called a sprue tree. The wax sprue tree is place into a metal flask cylinder, and a liquid, plaster like material known as investment is poured into the flask over the tree and allowed to harden.  

When the flask is dry, the wax is melted out.  What remains is the flask, the hardened investment and the negative space created after the wax from the copies and sprue have been removed.  Then the molten silver is poured quickly into the flask, filling the negatives spaces and cooled. 

There are ways to experiment with this type of casting, in other metals on a low budget using similar techniques to that described here.  To get to quality, jewelry grade casting the equipment costs can add up pretty darn quickly. 

Sometimes I get writers block. I guess you could call it Jewelry Design Block.   So inspiration to get off my arse and create something new, hangs up.   I do not seem to have any trouble with ideas, I just seem to have difficulty with getting going.  

I often thought this was about me as an artist worrying about how a piece will be accepted by my audience.   So my ego gets in the way I suppose.  I try to stop that type of internal dialog when I can.   I think it is my duty to deliver my explorations into my art,  and then move on.  I have to learn that art is not about perfection. 

This design causes me some angst, because this piece was a move sideways for me.  It is not complex. This sterling silver design is basic geometry, but it is appealing, right?  It does not have a pearl which I like to use in most of my designs. (I do have a matching pendant with a pearl set in this design).     It is inspired by, (and that Is good enough reason, I suppose, to have turned my inspiration into art) a plant that grows where I live that is called a Tree Fern. This fern grows about 15 feet tall. It is pretty amazing. The Hawaiian word for this fern is interpreted as "The Mother of the Forest".  The Tree Fern acts like a nursery for many of the native plants. Lots of little plants take root and sprout attached to this plant. Then fall off when the sprouts get bigger. This  fern is native to Hawaii where I live, and grows only at Cloud/Rain Forest elevations.

I love marketing, I always have. It should be a standard part of most any business. Here are some interesting numbers if you are interested in this type of thing.

I have been trying to create an internet presence for about 30 days or so now.  On one of the marketing websites I am using I just broke 10,000 impressions.  The cost was about $35.00  This works out to be a cost of about $3.50 per 1000 impressions. 

Somewhere In my long distant past, I was doing a whole lot of magazine advertising and a lot of mailings.  I had over 1 million people in my database of customers that had bought from me at the company's peak, eight years into the venture.   My cost back then for a page of advertising was about $5000 per page.  The magazine had about 650,000 subscribers.  So my cost per 1000 impressions was about $7.70 per 1000 impressions. 

As you can see the internet seems less expensive but, these numbers are not exactly comparing apples and oranges.  The magazine audited claim was that their pass through viewers was about 1,000,000 readers (reading at the newsstand not buying, or giving to a friend count as impressions).   So maybe the magazines cost per 1000 impressions was closer to $5.00

One of my social sites is closing in on 10,000 impressions as well.   It cost zero dollars per 1000 impressions.  It is not really very targeted to customers like the above marketing venues.