I recently tried this new product from Art Clay. It sounded great and I thought it would be fun to mix it with the Art Clay Silver. Even on its own I thought it sounded great.

Just a bit of info for those of you who haven’t tried this type of product before.

Art Clay Copper is a Clay material that you can use to make a wide range of pieces such as jewellery, craft designs, and objects like sculptures and models. Copper can be fired in an electric kiln without using carbon with the resulting fired piece being 100% pure Copper. The percentage of copper in the Art Clay Copper in clay state is 90%. The shrinkage in of Art Clay Copper during firing is under 10% in total. The firing temperature for the copper is 970°C where as the firing temperature for most Art Clay Silver products is 650°C.

Art Clay Copper only comes in the clay form. You can make your own paste by watering down the clay form. This comes in handy for joining 2 pieces together and for attaching bails etc.

 I found the Copper Clay very much the same as the silver to work with in the clay form. Remember that it does dry out very quickly so keep a spray bottle of water handy. You need to keep your tools separate as you don’t want to contaminate either clays. You should clean files in between use of silver and copper clays and use different sanding paper for each type of clay.

On one piece I made I set a couple of stones using the silver syringe type clay. My idea was the contrast between the copper and silver would be nice. I also layered a couple of pieces to see how joining the pieces of clay would go.

At first I tried firing it on a gas cook top. This was not successful as the temperature was not high enough. I got the gas blow torch out and used that with success. The problem I found was using the silver to set the stones. As the firing temp for silver is lower, the silver melted completely making the stone very unstable and the setting ended up looking very messy. When using the blow to torch to fire with you have to get the piece you are firing red hot and keep it that way for about 5 mins. Firing in the kiln is probably the most successful but this limits the people who can use it as kilns can be very expensive.

 The copper oxidizes while firing leaving the clay black in appearance. This needs to be removed by using a pickling solution. Pickling solution is a dry granular acid compound for cleaning and removing surface oxidization and scale from precious and non-ferrous metals. It can be bought at jewellery supply shops. It needs to be mixed with water and heated over the gas hot plate. Dip the piece you are cleaning into the pickling solution using copper tweezers until the scale has been removed. The piece then needs to be dipped in a sodium bi-carbonate mixture to neutralize the acid solution. The piece can then be burnished as usual using a burnisher. Please note also that you should not use steel containers or tweezers when using the pickle, the acid need to be heated in a glass container and copper tweezers should be used.

My overall opinion of this product is that is just as easy as the silver clay to work with before firing but firing and cleaning the piece afterwards can be difficult. For the average hobby jewellery maker at home this could be troublesome. Firing with the blow torch is an option as the torches are not expensive. A kiln seems to be the best way of firing but the cost of a kiln will put it out of reach for most hobbyists. I was disappointed with the fact that I couldn’t mix the 2 clays (silver and copper) together.

Have fun using this new product.

Jo Price, Instructor