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?
