News Roundup

First and foremost in my news of the week is that the contest I talked about entering here came to a result, and I got second place!! Besides $500, I got quite a nice line for the resume, I just don't know whether to file it under awards or exhibitions, since the tiara will be on display the weekend of September 17th as well. and according to the (probably) form email I got the judges were impressed with my work, which is a huge compliment given that the panel consists of an artist, an illustrator, a person from ARTISANworks, the owner of a gallery, and the Memorial Art Gallery's exhibitions director. So overexcited!

Less exciting is what's currently going on in my studio classes. My theme of a walk in the woods went down fairly well in jewelry though it could accidentally make a left turn into the idea of weeds. I still don't know what I am going to do for the chasing repousse project, for which my pitch bowl etc. arrived and I am working on tools for.

This is some of the results from my first attempt at true chemical dying of fabric. I'm particularly fond of the one on the right, as I was not expecting it to turn out at all. There's six other pieces brewing in the fabric studio and some of those I am even less sure about how they will look.

This is the low budget re-creation of what I am doing in  2D design, which is drawing various types of lines on paper that will then be cut out and arranged into a composition on some illustration board. It seems like it's adding an extra step to the process, but I can see the point, being that the professor wants us to be able to rearrange and play with the line elements before we glue them down. Above is one of the lines I came up with that the professor liked. Still, the class is tending towards the boring side and reminding me how middling I am at two dimensional works.

The goal for next week is to be less harried in making a blog post, since between work and classes I don't have enough time to think!

Recycled Art Competion

This is going to be a content light post, since it's the quickest and easiest webspace for me to upload the images I'm using to enter the Greentopia Recycled Art Competition, and email isn't being nice in letting me send them. Both small and large images and a copy of the artist's stament are here for your enjoyment!

( Click for Large)

( Click for Small)



Artist’s Statement on “Post Apocalyptic Puck”

                At the time I made “Post Apocalyptic Puck” I was interested in the theme of science fiction, particularly in making artifacts and jewelry that looked like they came from the future. Consequently this piece wound up with a detailed small story behind it. It is meant to have come from a post-apocalyptic future where mankind has lost much of its technology and has fallen back to believing in magic. In this bleak future I envisioned a surviving man who wishes to emulate the magical and mythological beings of older times, particularly mischievous fairies like Puck. Thus in order to display his imagined power, this future man has fashioned himself a magnificent crown out of the man made debris and small shiny objects left after the apocalypse.

                With such a story in place, I was able to freely design the piece using the stash of found objects I keep to use in my jewelry. Most of it comes from my odd habit of always looking at the ground for lost and forgotten little “treasures,” which are supplemented by friends and family giving me old broken jewelry and things to re-use. Being gifted a set of grapefruit spoons in this manner was the direct inspiration for this piece and I gladly took up the challenge of incorporating them into a work. Actively avoiding fabricating pieces from new metal the tiara steady grew, its shape dictated by the existing objects I had and my own sense of design, making “Post Apocalyptic Puck” a unique joy to create.

Artifacts From The Future!

So I recently noticed a running sub theme to all my projects this semester in jewelry, namely that they are all things from the future, in addition to being science fictiony. First there's the tiara who's basic story hasn't changed,

But now we have the trophy wifes golden nugget "Asteroid Fields Forever" necklace, you know the one she wore to her tycoon husband's party in 2093 celebrating the new asteroid he found to mine for unobtainium,

(Yes I am slightly disappointed in how it came out too but que sera, the lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible?)

And to top it off we have the vintage from the year 3063 finger piano made by "Starburst Instruments, Neptune"

It actually sounds quite melodic; a lot better than the tinny video I have of me wailing on it it here,

So until later enjoy these aritfacts from the world of tommorow... today?

Playing Catch Up

Gasp! where have the asteroids gone?

Why they're  right here!

As you can see they are about half soldered together, there's still some fill in to do before they are tumbled clean. Likewise my kalimba is coning along, I've hydraulic die formed the bottom of the sound box and half soldered a giant bezel of a wall to it. I've also begun planning the top, but there are some supplies I need to get first.

Woooooooo ghostly blue pickle! In other exciting news that I got so wrapped up in I didn't have time to post, was that my tiara went down the runway at the fashion department's big event, Runway 4.0!

As you can see my camera was less than apprectiative of the contrast of bright stage lights and the dark audience. The tiara was graciously modeled by Molly for Clare Canavan's clothing line.



Here's a short video I took of all the models going around angain at the end of the show. You can see my tiara at 45 seconds or so, it's the one the camera tracks. After this we finally held our own personal "runway" in the classroom, where we had to wear our tiaras to a song and do some preformance art by strutting around.

I "danced" to this song and everyone really liked it and thought it fit the jewelry piece well, though given the the number of vaguely Irish instrumental songs other students also used, I can't help but wonder if I should have gone with something composed on an Atari for that extra futuristic chiptune sound.

Riveting my Brains Out

Don't worry I got them back in later. So why rivets? Well, you see, like many long, strange trips to brain loss I began making the tiara project in my basement during the last two days of break.

While doing that I revised my original plan a little bit in order to incorporate more spoons into the tiara, this is the only sketch I made showing what the right side of the tiara would look like.

And here it is riveted together. I decided to cold connect the entire piece because I used silver plated spoons and heat will ruin the finish.

Because I scrapped much of my original design there was lots of trial and error with masking tape. The dangly rhinestones over the nose (theres a rhinoplasty joke in there somewhere) never made it into the final piece, among other ideas too ridiculous to photograph.

This is the basic form of the tiara all riveted together, what remained was to decorate it with found objects which some of the holes for riveting those were done on the drill press at home.

The top image is the first trial layout of items and the bottom is the later, mostly final arrangement of objects on the tiara. By this time it was Monday and I was back at school.



Here it is half riveted at about 11 o'clock on Wednesday night, after obtaining more drill bits, when I decided it would be a better idea to go to bed and finish it on Thursday.



And here its is finished! Enjoy the four picture turn around of it. There are 30 rivets holding it together including the found objects. Besides the spoons (of which there are 6.5) going from the left there is a gold domed clip earring wire wrapped on, a pink and white plastic leaf necklace part, silver crescent shaped pierced earring, 1940 Canadian penny with copper disc underneath, two buick key knock outs, a Chrysocolla cabochon in a copper star, an gold clip earring back, a re-created necklace hang tag (I broke the original trying to get it attached), three brillant cut CZs and blue plastic gems in a nickel-silver volcano setting, a wire wrapped brown plastic clip earring, and a bee clip earring. All of this makes it a heavy piece with a lot of weight towards the front, you can't look down with it on or else it starts slipping down your forehead. Form over function I suppose...

I'm so proud of this work I actually decided to be pretentious and dug out my stamping set and put my initals plus the date on it. The bonus picture on the right is most of the rivets visible on the inside of the forehead band. They've been crushed pretty smooth so they don't catch too much on one's hair. Speaking of which...



Here it is being worn and me doing my best "concentrating on pressing the shutter" face. I'm going to be submitting this piece for the fashion show that the fashion tech department does each year, this year jewelry is doing a bit of a collaboration with them, and I hope my piece gets accepted! Now, some of you may be wondering what happened to the asteroid necklace and well.......

It got casted, the smaller one is 1.6 ounces and the large tree is 12.6 ounces of brass. Coincidentally, we found out the electromelt can maybe hold 14 ounces of metal. It looks like I'll be working on this again Friday morning when I hand in my tiara untill the next project is assigned.

Progress, Quickly

Here's the current scoop in jewelry:

Worked on the asteroids some more and laid them out on the silver wire. There are fifteen on the wire plus the one on the end of the neck ring which means I have a total of 31 objects to cast in brass. So, the plan is to finish refining the asteroids Sunday, sprue and weigh Monday, invest Tuesday, and cast Wednesday. outside of this I have been working on the copper rod/wire practice for attaching the ingot. I've discovered that it goes a lot easier when you use the correct hammer. And a final note on the asteroids here is my map of which ones goes where, for those interested in recursive scrabble:



Continuing on, I turned my desk into a war zone Friday....

...In order to create a model of my next piece in my other favorite medium, Paper!

Here's a crazy composite picture of me wearing the tiara I sketched in my last post. Hopefully everyone can see whats going on a little better, at least with the two spoons and the five triangular flowers to the right. The scribbled black oval is where a black stone may go, but it might be some other found object. The pointed circular dip below the black spot will be a large white cubic zirconia volcano bezel set upside down with a nickel-silver collar. I'm also planning to intertwine beads and other junk in the flowers stems to off set the various colorful stones and stuff between the spoons. Not much more to say, though I'll leave you with two more pictures of the tiara model; one on its own and one where its propped up by Atari carts.

Tantrums and Tiaras

To unwind from the stress and minor freakouts over the asteroid necklace I thought it best to get a head start on the next project by sketching and drafting a blog post by staying up way too late before my 8:00 am jewelry class. Let's get started shall we?

I know absolutely nothing about this singer or their album but I compulsively saved this image for its cool visual reference to the 1927 film (and art deco masterpiece) Metropolis, particulary by combining the robot character Maria with the look of the city enviroments featured.

Naturally Maria is on the left and the city model/matte painting are on the right, and this sort of angular modernism was my gut reaction for a style to base the tiara in when I first heard about the project. If you'll recall the spoons I mentioned earlier, they fit right right into this idea given that grapefruit spoons are rather pointed with a serrated tip. So, I set about sketching various arrangements for the spoons:

Most of the sketches use the spoons in boring crown arrangements, I even had a sketch that strung wires between the radating spoon handles reminiscent of this gentleman's headgear. But, these designs went out the window when I recieved more specific requirements for the tiara.

According to the project shee,t the tiara not only has to tie to your theme but also be based on or for a character from fiction, history, or myth. Going on myth, I then wanted to incorporate an old idea for triangular brass flowers into the tiara and from there my mind leapt to the cliche of a post-apocalyptic future where technology is forgotten and surviving humanity has reverted to magic and mysticism.



Wait, What?


See, I happen to be playing my way through an old NES game called Crystalis, where the plot is that a war reduces humanity back to medieval times and you as the hero (recently revived from a cryogenic sleep) must stop an evil army from conquering the world through the used of forbbiden technology combined with magic. In the game, I found a gas mask which I needed to enter a forest filled with poision gas and was struck by how this was a leftover technological object used by a society now devoted to magic.

Now because I wanted to still incoporate both the spoons and the geometric brass flowers into the tiara I set about reconciling this as something a mischevious fairy might do; that is make themselves a crown of "natural" flowers and leaves as well as any found objects that appealed to them, such as stones and shiny things like...spoons. The post-apocalypse loss of magic works into this scenario with this fairy character being someone in the future who uses magic and models himself on what mystical creatures do, that is, wear crowns made of natural materials. So this future-fairy makes his crown, a symbol that denotes a magical being to him (and us), from bizzare flowers plus found objects in the random derbris left over from the past humanity. Therefore we get something that looks like this:

This is a tiara that has a brass base plate with two silverplate spoons riveted to it and triangular brass flowers on copper stems woven through with seemingly random stone settings, both regular bezel and volcano bezel set. It's a thrilling design I want to get started on right away, but the first order of business is to make a paper model and carefully plan each element for functionality and to prevent a too cluttered look.

Now you may be asking who is this "fairy" character that's supposed to be wearing this? I've looked into this and decided to go for the one of the first two characters that people associate first when faiaries are mentioned, Puck from A Mid-Summernight's Dream. I am well aware that Puck is technically not a fairy but an elf, and that most depictions of him do not have leaves in his hair. But, he is a mischievous character who practices magic and could be malevolent if left to his own devices in, say, an apocalyptic magic based future, so Puck it is.

Plus, a working title of Post-Apocalyptic Puck works on so many levels better than Post-Apocalyptic Oberon, don't you think?