After employing mosaics and jigsaw puzzles to impart texture to fine art, Powercoin are back with embroidery for their latest coin
One of the more innovative producers of modern collectible coins operating today, Rome-based Powercoin have issued some clever coins over the last decade. Chief amongst them are their popular textured fine art coins, more commonly known as Micropuzzle Treasures, and Micromosaic Passion, the former using a jigsaw puzzle texture, the latter a traditional Romanesque mosaic one. Now they’re introducing a new texture – embroidery.
The concept behind this type of coin is quite simple. Using the strike to imitate texture is nothing new, but using it to imitate the pieces of a puzzle was a clever twist. We feel the mosaic series was even more impressive, particularly in Series II form, because that texture has to flow with the subject, and the more effort expended on getting that right, directly translated into a better coin. With embroidery, that becomes ever more complicated. If you want it to look realistic, you can’t just splash a textile texture over a coin and call it complete, it requires more care when merging it with the source artwork.
The subject for the first 3 oz coin is a staple of the numismatic world, Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. This work is an excellent choice because its style lends itself to being broken down into small areas, each of which can have a different type of embroidery texture applied to it. It isn’t a particularly original choice, unfortunately, but in this case its the perfect one to demonstrate what this series is about. Hopefully, we’ll see more original choices for future issues, and given that Powercoin have shown a terrific knack of doing just that in other textured fine-art series, we have no concerns on that front.
The threaded needle, and the background loom are very cool little touches, as is the embroidered date to the left. It’s all very well realised, with every element carefully brought to life. The obverse continues the theme, with the loom texture reappearing, and neat touches like the needle from the reverse showing through, as if it’s passed through the coin, and the series title done with thread, but reversed, as if it was showing through from the front.
In summary, another clever and attractive release, impressively sized at 65 mm, and one that fits into Powercoin’s portfolio perfectly. It comes presented in one of those easy to display latex-skin frames, and just 499 will be minted. Another series we’ll keep an eye on, and add to the summary profile of this producers textured fine-art coins, which will debut soon. Available to order now.
| SPECIFICATION | |
| DENOMINATION | $20 Palau |
| COMPOSITION | 93.3 g of 0.999 silver |
| DIMENSIONS | 65.0 mm |
| FINISH | Silk |
| MODIFICATIONS | High-relief, smartminting, colour |
| MINTAGE | 499 |
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