Covered box of hammer worked brass. “Moonlit night shore. Roughscale sole”

Flounders that are not so big can be seen in the sand of shallow water. As a child, I used to go to the beach with my swim ring and looked into the water with my swimming goggles to look for flounders hiding in the sand.
I was looking at an illustrated book of deep-sea creatures that my daughter gave me, and I found the Roughscale Flounder. I thought that its bumpy skin and the way it was lying in the sand would be perfect to express with brass patina and finishing techniques.
The main structure is simple, but I tried to make the core with silver to exactly fit inside.
I used a chisel from the inner side of the lid to make bumps and dips on the surface.

• Hammer forming

  In hammer forming (tankin), a mallet is used to shape a sheet of metal by hammering it into recessions in a wooden stump or block. Next, the metal sheet is worked on the end of specially shaped iron bars known as forming stakes (ategane) to gradually create the final form. It takes tens of thousands of hammer strikes to produce a single finished work.