Dot, Dot, Dot, Dash, Dash, Dash, Dot, Dot, Dot

Having no ideas for my five pins of doom I thought I might try looking at old space probes, since looking at images of Jupiter helped me so much in making a pendant for mold making.

Silly me forgot that scientific instruments aren't exactly made for looks nor are all that wonderful to pull design elements from as evidenced by Venera-9 up there, but at least I found this guy's website again, and his excellent write ups and images on the Soviet Venus missions, with bits on their Moon probes  and Mars erm, attempts. The net result of this is that I changed my computer background to an old Viking Mars image,

and have a dim sketch of a pin based almost entirely on my memory of what the Voyager probes looked like.

After indulging my interests in all matters space related, I tripped back through my sketch book to bring out some old designs: particularly this movable gear pin,

as well as rotating my see-saw earring on to its side for this pin.

From here I went into my inspirational art image folder on my computer (because every designer has one of those) and found a comic strip with lions in it as part of the joke where I really, really liked the way their eyes were drawn so I attempted to do an acrylic inlay of it.

This in turn has made me go find a way to remedy my lack of a belt sander situation, as trying to fit the green plastic into the black ended in snapping, words, and a lot of gluing.

Thus far I am most happy with this switchblade heart as I'm calling it, it being the first try at messing around with the hydraulic die formed shapes I've had for weeks. You can tell I can't decide if the front or back looks better, but damn does it look spiffy with the malachite cabochon sitting on it.

If you're really paying atttention to this post you've noted that there are only four pins of doom reperesented here. Sadly I'm back to ramming my head against the wall for the fifth design and trying to work hydraulic die shapes into to it. Once I make the last pin though I'll either edit this post or make a new one (depending on how grand a piece of jewelry it is). Until then I'll just put a non-sequitur conclusion here with one of the trippy animations of the 1960s, The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics directed by Chuck Jones for MGM in 1965. Most of my work is geometric anyways so it fits, I guess?