Quantify It!

For some reason I am apparently not allowed to see Albert Paley or an exhibition of his, since this is the second time in a row an illness has prevented me from going to see him. Le sigh. In other news my summer independent studies have started and that requires a blog post mandated from on high!

First a note about the weather. I expected it to be hot in the studio, but good lord it was probably almost literally 100 degrees the first day and no one was doing any torch work, the lights were off, and a Bunsen burner was used only twice. The first thing I had to do naturally was go and get a thermometer, stick it to my bench and write a sign underneath it saying "quantify it!" The idea being that it is much more fun to complain about the heat when you know exactly how hot it is even though it changes nothing about how miserable it is.

I made these earrings as part of a hydraulic die forming work shop (that Chris Irick lovingly came to present) and thought I would try to do something along these lines for my study in production. My professor said it was too simple and to come up with a variety of simple shapes to hydraulic die form and then combine into a piece that looks complex. This got me thinking about modularity, and particularly about this Avon pin:

It's a partridge in a pear tree I believe, and you can wear the pin with the bird in the tree or take off the tree and wear just a cute little bird. Currently, I am wondering if its possible to apply the idea of the pin to earrings and have made a few sketches to that effect.

A part of this project will probably involve me finally making embossing plates, and I have a few objects lined up to take patterns from with photographs, put in black and white, up the contrast, then tile or other wise manipulate in Photoshop. Perhaps I will even have an excuse to bust out my tablet!

On the other independent study hand (does that mean the left doesn't know what the right is doing?) rubber mold making has gotten off to a good start, I've seen the demos so I just need to carve or fabricate something over the weekend starting with a pendant and including stone setting in all the planned projects.

Here are the stones I picked from my stash for all of the pieces. The mookaite on the left will be for the pendant, the rutilated quartz in the middle for the ring and the black chatoyant somethings on the right will be for earrings. The malachite is hanging around in case I get motivated or inspired to use it instead. Now because the mookaite looks like this,

I have been making pendant sketches based on Jupiter's atmosphere.

It's given me a great excuse to dig out all my old astronomy books and to raid JPL's image site, which used to be a great source for computer background images. Fun fact: I did consider going to college for astronomy, but I realized I mostly just liked looking at the pretty pictures. There's still time to become an amateur though I'll probably just visit the Astronomy Picture of the Day site more often. (they have bigger images for backgrounds hint, hint.)