Half Baked and Not in a Good Way

Completely uninspired, I've been messing about with wax and a couple other things to no real avail. Did start on a small tree sculpture I have wanted to make for a while, in hopes that it would lead to some sort of inspiration.









Before embarking (ha ha!) on making the tree sculpture I made this pendant and earring sample which look pretty bad, along with an agressively mediocre chain sample. I just can't seem to come up with any good production ideas, particulary ideas that come in a full set of earrings, necklace, and pin.



After six hours of sketching in front of classy television shows from the 80s all I could come up with was this pendant (which does have matching earrings by the way) rendered here in a new stiffer blue wax I bought to play with. It looks distressingly famliar to me though, like I've seen it somewhere before.

I also came up with the design for my last rubber mold making project: the ring. Initally I was going to make it out of wax first but it requires some tight bends the wax doesn't like doing no matter how much I heat it up. I have a little rutilated quartz cabochon I will set into this ring, can you guess where?

Welp, this creative block is no fun, and usually I solve them by going to a museum or some such place to look at other people art. Unfortunately, I am largely stuck at home next week due to honorably jury duty. At least I may be able to finish these projects I've started if the weather's cool enough to use a torch for long periods...



Corn Hill Trip Report

This past Sunday I went to the Corn Hill Arts Festival in Rochester, NY. For those not in the know it is an annual summer arts festival held in the historic Corn Hill neighborhood in the heart of the city, which means artists come to hawk their wares in the summer heat for a weekend.

This year I noticed they had less vendors, but higher quality goods. Many of the obviously Chinese made and commercial product resellers weren't there this year, and the obligatory Comfort Windows/Bath Fitter/other home improvement businesses were confined to the area around the gazebo, along with most of the food vendors. It's a good thing that the festival appears to finally be weeding out the lesser merchandise, even if it does raise the average price of goods.

Since pictures are largely frowned upon (some artists even have no photographs please signs on their booths) I'll have to make due with the websites and images within of a few artists.

I got this pitcher in red from ceramicist Allan Ditton, who was quite happy that another artist was buying it and had some interesting advice basically amounting to having a fallback option like teaching. There is more of his work for sale here, if anyone is interested.

Now each year the festival has a section for emerging artists, which according to their website is for artists aged 15 to 25 who have never been in a juried art show before. I like to go through this often small and deserted section to see if there is any great hidden talent. This year there was glass artist Nick Cohn, who had these beautiful small vases, all of them were perfectly proportioned, no lopsidedness or anything. As you can tell I like the black and white marbled ones the best and may yet buy one from his Etsy shop.

Out of all the jewelers at Corn Hill this year I was suprised to find only one person, Heidi Kester of Woodland Wisp Jewelry Creations, who uses Precious Metal Clay to make pieces. As much as I hate working with clay, there are some advantages with its flexibility and I have been curious to try the sort of witchcraft that clay, once fired in a small kiln, becomes metal.

As you can see I've saved the best for last, the amazing designs of Trisko Jewelry Sculptures, by Robert and Helen Trisko. Naturally they had much much more at the festival all if it very architectural jewelry and all of it gold. This is actually the second time I've seen a jeweler with thousand dollar price tags at a festival and the only reason I can think of for them being at a craft show is purely for advertising's sake, especially when we're discussing solid 14 and 18k gold pieces that go up to 10,000 dollars, literally.

Overall it was a really good Corn Hill and much better than in years past. For the record this year's must have item was iron dragonfly lawn ornaments that had been welded together, and quite bargain priced. Also no one can come up with anything creative to do with beach glass outside of drilling it, wire wrapping it, and bezel setting it. With this distraction over, it time to get back to work on my own stuff, and perhaps, finish something.

I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Earrings...

Here they are hanging in a row. After being away from the internet (by virtue of being busy) I've come to the conclusion that this jewelry thing may not be as easy as I initally hoped. Specifically I am supposed to develop a production line of jewelry and keep coming up with tangental things instead.

Like these spirally earrings that take a whopping foot of wire to do. More earrings is fine and good and all, but I really need more pins and pendants that aren't like this:

I hardly ever actually do pendants or necklaces thus everything is turning into an exercise in fustration, and fustration leads to wierder earrings apparently, like this purposefully backwards one.

Dunno if having the ear wire coming out of the front is too wierd for people to handle. In other news I made a rather meh looking rubber mold (finally), and am now something of an expert in cutting recording media apart.

As for the mentioned cutting recording media apart I have learned the following:

         - Records cut way too easily.
         - Laser discs are twice as thick as records due to their double sidedness.
         - Compact Disc labels gum up the saw blade quickly, and won't stay on once the disc
            is cut.
        - Center punches do a good job of cracking both Laser Discs and CDs.
        - Laser Discs and CDs are smelly. As in they smell more like acrylic than acrylic itself.

I have yet to find a double sided DVD to cut up and see if that alleviates the problem of the label and foil flaking off of regular CDs. I was so hoping I could have more colorful earrings like the ones at the top of the post too by using labeled CDs but I guess it's not to be.

So it's back to the sketchbook to try and come up with sets of necklaces, pins, and earrings. I'd like to focus on getting something to go along with my heart shaperd pin/pendant from a week or so ago. Also on the horizon, experimenting with some silver on copper dishes I found. We shall see exactly how many possible ways there is to destroy plating...

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?

Earrings, Ear...rains?

It turns out that I may like shiny and round laserdiscs too much to cut them up, just look at it up on my bulletin board there. Real life did get in the way of making earring prototypes which is why I could only make four and two half pairs. That will make more sense as we dive into the pictures of what I did make and did not have time to make!

Yep those clicky clacky record and metal earrings from last week are back along with

earrings that I rather like and have been told look like gladiator style or "something from Portal,"

this pair of sterling and vinyl ones that are kinda Sonic the Hedgehog looking,

another random acrylic and brass pair plus,

two single earring jackets made from Pente pieces, hence the "two half pairs" bit.

Onward to things that could have been, starting with this revamp of last week's leaf earring jacket into a full earring.

A combination tuxedo/five inch floppy disk earring! Actually this one was supposed to have the black acrylic bit swivel out from the silver triangle part, but alas time ate that one, too.

For giggles the original design of the blue pente piece earring jackets,

some sort of random seesaw earrings,

still messing around with an old oscilloscope based design,

treble clef earring with chimes hanging from them,

and, finally, the corresponding bass clef pair. This is the point where I ran out of ideas in the sketchbook, you see. From here I get to go on to make five pin prototypes/samples, which real life threatens to loom over as well. As a teaser, here are the two simplistic pins I was able to make beforehand: a 3D/not 3D cube pin, and a blobby X thing. Consider them a preview for next week.



Plastics Really are the Future!

Despite being slammed to the wall with daily life, I was able to crank out these single earrings as samples for production.

Since I foolishly said I banged these out over the weekend I now have been set to making ten more earring samples and five pins which will be interesting as real life theatens to take over this week as well.

On the upside in the pre-critique for these pieces they were greeted favorably which naturally means I hated them. Still I wanted to further explore combining acrylic with metal and of course started coming up with a boat load of interesting designs after the critique. Side note: everyone liked the leaf earring even though I think its the most boring thing ever but, I have redesigned the earwire for it so stay tuned I guess?

Somehow in all this I remembered records are made of vinyl which is a plastic and that there are tons of them to be had for dirt cheap at thrift stores so new material ahoy!

I'm pleased to announce cutting a record is easier than acrylic, even factoring in how thin it is, and quite fun actually! Im also glad it didn't shatter even when drilling it to start making these earrings:

I wussed out and didn't use silver sheet for the overlaying tear drop pieces because the sheet I do have of sterling is a lot smaller than I thought which is why these look a little like roads, but oh well. The next step is to ball up some silver wire for ear wires on my fancy home soldering system:

Also work mates are awesome and everyone should have at least one, go to Sears now and buy one, I command it!

For the other earrings I'm going to attempt to make an image dump post with the finished projects as the sketches aren't much to look at and make little sense to anyone but me. And as for other alternative materials to explore there's always laser discs.

Error! Recalculating... Error! Recalculating...

A lot changes in a week, for example my fancy Jupiter pendant from last week has turned into this:

Which then abuptly turned into this, ready for casting:

and it will be casted in brass this Thursday! I was also going to set these turquoise stones (plus a CZ in the little end loop) in it much like the lower right sketch, but I dropped one and broke it.

Oh well, it wasn't a particuarly great stone to begin with as I now realize. It's off to riogrande.com for a new, kind of expensive one.

Now because I wound up doing last minute cleanup and investing for casting my Jupiter pendant for mold making, I haven't gotten as far as I had hoped on my hydraulic experments for the production side of things.

First I tested what little I was able to round up and send through a rolling mill to "print" the texture on the metal. Above is what was left of the strings I used and wound up with shallow rope like lines on the sheet metal. I also tried some cheap old lace stuff which survived the mill, but also gave me a shallow kind of stippled pattern. Oddly the novelty paperclips worked perfectly well, observe:

And despite being probably made of steel neither the paperclips, copper, or rolling mill was ruined (well further ruined in the case of our old rolling mill, no wonder its being replaced).

In terms of what to actually do with said hydraulic forms and textures has been all thrown out the window at this point due to a debate between high end and low end jewelry. I had a inital idea to combine paper origami with metal in earrings etc. in order to have something within the twenty dollar or lower range for the student sale. Most of this short sightedness is due to the shawl pins from the last sale being too esoteric and too overpriced an item to sell and needing money to finance long term tools.

But since the mixed media with paper thing is border line junk that could be cranked out at a later date, I've re-thought a little for the long term and am thinking earring jackets are the way to go.

They're out there but not too out there, if you know what I mean. This way I can offer a cheaper alternative to the gold and white gold examples above and still have the mix and match modularity with the customer's own earrings I orginally was thinking about last week. This way the rubber mold making stuff can be higher end, and the bottom end can be the d-pad pins, a trefoil flower pin with a shape that accidentally looks like the Mitsubishi logo, and the hydraulic triangle earrings with roll printed designs I made for myself. Also stone settings and studs with white cz's would be relatively easy to make in order to pair with them.

Naturally now that I have some semblance of a plan I feel like I wasted a bunch of time on mostly unusuable hydraulic dies and other materials, but at least gained the advice that I should approach making jewelry to sell the same way I approach getting an art style which is to not force it and just let it develop on its own, meaning that I shouldn't try to predict what will sell to a market while trying to tailor to it and just make some cool designs I like.