One of our favorite stops when we take family trips to Door County, WI is Hand On Art Studio near Fish Creek. It’s a great place to have fun with all forms of art. All of the metal projects shown below were made at Hands-On.

Planning for the Crane: For my first major metal piece, I planned ahead and created a full-scale pattern in illustrator. The design isn’t original, we have a fire pit with the same crane pattern. I adapted it for some yard art.

Working with a plasma cutter. The pieces were cut from pieces of steel. I don’t remember the gauge, but it was around 1/16th of an inch I think. Getting smooth lines with the cutter takes a ton of practice. I never really mastered it.

First experience with welding. It’s WAY harder than you would think to get it right. Requires lots of practice.

Grinding away. Since using the plasma cutter was a little harder to control than I expected, I spent a lot of time with the handheld grinder smoothing things out.

Polished and ready to go.

Butterfly. After the massive effort of the crane, I wanted to try something a little more simple. This was way easier by comparison, but getting the interior plasma cuts smoothed out was very tricky.

Butterfly after a couple of years outside.

Great Blue Heron. We had another trip planned to Door County, so I wanted to try another metalworking project. I came up with the idea of making a Great Blue Heron. I found a random picture on the Web, converted it to line art, and develop full-scale patterns.

Like usual, working the plasma cutter is tricky and this time resulted in lots of jagged edges. I was also use a much thicker gauge steel this time.

… some that means more time on the grinder to clean things up.

Heron after a year outside.