ah harrr! ok I am no good at pirate talk, me hearty peoples, I sound more like Alan Partridge :) So with my terrible pirate speak I shall let you all know I has gone and got it I has, in slightly better english I have mentioned to a couple of you that I would really like to do something to contribute to the group, my stacklet is so small tis embarassing to try and find something worthy of donating, so this super raffle3 I can only try to get a ticket, however I am always one to look to the future and I have mentioned I am trying to design an 'SSG community' piece of silver that I can then donate to a future raffle. I have played around the last few days with skulls, and flags, and swords, and bones, and seriously I cannot draw bones! I wanted something that reflected pirates and coins and said thank you from me, in a sense, :)
After much thinking and scribbling, and discussing with my daughter, I have to mention here that I do not identify as an artist either :) I just draw when I need to, if you want a real artist then my second daughter is amazing, all my children have a talent for art but my 17 yr old is truly gifted, so I ask her expert advice :) I showed her what I had achieved so far and just as I expected my daughter spotted immediately what was needed and so together we have come up with something this was it at first:

then after an hour or so of scribbling

I would have asked her to draw it but she is working very hard already, she studies at college, and so you have to put up with my efforts :) I am happy just to get the design together and my thoughts are now working over time on how I first make this in bronze, and reduce its size, the finished item should weigh roughly an ounce, to make anything costs me a lot in silver so the end one has to be smaller. As an example of how much this costs it cost me £66 to make batman the one I showed you the other day, he weighed 28g roughly, so its basically say £70 cost to make a 1 ounce piece for me.
there are a number of reasons I have to do it this way, it would be way cheaper, possibly? to pour something like this, but it would be either a generic mould bought, which would not be my design, no good, or it would mean buying a bespoke mould, cost again, or it's this way, in which I model it first in bronze, make my own mould, then cast and fire it.
I prefer it this way it's my work the whole way from design to mould to finished product. Just call me a control freak :) this design is a lot more simple than I would usually attempt, mainly because I am still very much at the learning stage and I am working with expensive material, if I can get a good result from this then I will become braver and add more detail, one of the fabulous things about getting to work with bronze is I can make bigger projects, I am really looking forward to starting some dragons I love all forms of dragons and will be working on starting some designs soon, my daughter wants me to do a pirate ship so that's in the works too. So many ideas :)
so I hope my lovely ssg friends like my design I really hope it works well in silver, and I also hope you all have a fabulous day
and on that note I started as Alan Partridge so I shall finish as Alan Partridge :)

my thanks, respect and love to the ssg community