About the Beat Life into your Forging course
The course is for advanced blacksmiths and will give you four weeks of opportunities to improve your forging abilities. The start will be a leaf to explain the basics and give you the needed skills for the upcoming lessons. The further classes will take you via animal heads, to human figures and finally birds. During each lesson, helpful concepts to bring your forging to life will be introduced. Every week you will get instruction videos and handouts to take to your workshop. You will have time to practice on your own, and share your progress with others. At the end of each lesson, we will discuss the questions which arose during your practice to give you the most benefit.
Content of the Beat Life into your Forging course
The first week of the course will be about forging leaves. This project is simple enough that everyone attending the course has done a leaf at some point of their forging career. That makes it the perfect entry because many of the concepts to give your blacksmith work more aliveness can be applied and everyone feels able to do it.
During the second week, we will work with animal heads. These lessons will be about forging from different angles and hunt for the right outline and detail in your ironwork. Another big subject will be tooling for figures and how the vice can support your work in the most constructive way.
Week three will be about human shapes. We take a deeper look into the concept of negative space and some other techniques and concepts learned from the animal heads.
At the final week we will work with flying creatures like birds and dragons. You will learn a new approach to which starting material will support your desired outcome best. After the discussion of the final week, we will take some time together to review the progress during the course and share ideas how to apply the learned things.
Format of the course
The course is planned in a way to give the participants maximum freedom to learn in their pace. On the other hand, we want to provide enough guidance to enable good success.
Every monday the videos hand handouts (material) for the upcomming week will be provided. This will happen via the members area on this website and in the closed facebookgroup for the course. Each tuesday we will have a Zoom-Meeting discussing the results and progress of participants. There is also time to talk about the tasks for the upcomming week. During the other days of the week participants have time to work on the tasks. You are encouraged to share your progress in the facebook group so participants can learn from each other.
At the last weeks sunday we will meet for the last time during this course. We will discuss the tasks of the previous week and review what we have learned thoughout the course.
What you get
- Four weeks filled with challenges and opportunities to bring your blacksmithing to the next level
- Access to handouts about techniques, concepts and tooling exclusively created for this course
Overview
| Day | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 |
| Monday |
Platform opens Innitial material will be available |
New material and tasks | New material and tasks | New material and tasks |
| Tuesday | Welcome to the course and introduction talk |
Discussing of results and giving individual feedback Answering questions about the tasks for the week |
Discussing of results and giving individual feedback Answering questions about the tasks for the week |
Discussing of results and giving individual feedback Answering questions about the tasks for the week |
| Wednesday | Participants work independantly and can share their progress with Kees and other participants |
Participants work independantly and can share their progress with Kees and other participants |
Participants work independantly and can share their progress with Kees and other participants |
Participants work independantly and can share their progress with Kees and other participants |
| Thursday | ||||
| Friday | ||||
| Saturday | ||||
| Sunday | Final Talk and debrief |