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Derek Brown Interns at Master Craftsman

Published April 12, 2019

from FSU Art BA ’19 Derek Brown:

“The time I have spent working in Master Craftsman Studios, this past semester, has been nothing short of amazing! As a Student, I am getting the opportunity to be exposed to and work with experienced and talented people in the art community who are also educators. I still can not even begin to describe how incredible an opportunity like this truly is.

The Master Craftsman Studios is a fabrication group that is a part of Florida State University’s facilities department. The team gets projects ranging anywhere from, signs marking one of FSU’s many buildings, to FSU’s Stone benches, all the way to stained glass and detailed bronze statues of notable figures in FSU’s history. Through the course of this semester I have personally gotten the chance to work on two major projects, as well as several smaller ones. The major projects are I have personally had a hand in are: the Double Tree hotel chandelier, which is a large aluminum welded tree that is covered with epoxy clay that was then textured and painted to look like a real tree. It also contains electrical wiring that makes the tree light up over the hotel’s dance floor. The second major project, that was commissioned by a clarinet player from the first year of Marching Chiefs, is the Florida State University Marching Chief’s stained glass window for the Dodd Hall campus museum. The work I have done on the project was sculpt and paint the center piece of the window, being a representation of a clarinet player. The process to completing the window has many steps and has exposed me to a new medium which I would not otherwise have ever tried: stained glass. Both of these projects have taught me a lot about working on a set schedule, and many technical skills that come with working with new materials I have not previously experienced.

Along with working on commissioned works, Master Craftsman Studios also affords me the opportunity to work on my personal projects as well. Through that I have learned new skills such as: rubber casting, glass casting, laser etching, and much more. It is this freedom combined with working on commissioned works that has given me an experience that I couldn’t have found at any other university.

I hope that this post has shed some light on what it is that Master Craftsman Studios does for not only the art community, but for students as well.”