This past autumn, I had the honor of designing a jewelry set for five bridesmaids!
The color theme was reds and golds, with hints of pearl and green. Each of the girls would be wearing a different dress in the same color, and each girl had different jewelry requirements (pierced/non-pierced ears, short/long necklace, etc).
The necklace shape is also adjustable-- since I created a braided base, it could be gently pinched into a pointed shape, or a flat, or rounded style. If you look closely at the pictures of the bridesmaids, you'll see that each necklace is worn differently!
The bride wore a thick lace veil with a bright, bold wreath of red and gold flowers and leaves on top, and the jewelry was designed to coordinate with her style.
It goes without saying that these five sets were a fair bit of work! Each necklace had a braided base that looks very similar to my braided circlets. Beads and glass leaves of all kinds were woven on in matching patterns, and beads adorned the adjustable golden chain.
These are the earrings and ear cuffs designed for the bridesmaids!
The ear cuffs were beautifully decorative; the bride loves fairytale styles so I had fun going overboard with the sparkly bling!
One of the girls had double piercings and wore two sets of dangles! I'd never really heard of that kind of pairing before, but wouldn't you agree that it is a lovely combination?
The other girls all wore variations of my Enchanted Forest Earrings in gold and red.
I also created a pair of barefoot sandals for the bride! The picture below is with shoes from our outdoor photoshoot, but these "fairy sandals" work well barefoot, too!
This is the entire set of jewelry, representing a couple weeks of work!
I didn't photograph the rings very well, but in this picture you can see the leaf flower ring and the gold-and-red wirewrapped rosette ring on the maid of honor!
This was one of the most unique weddings I've attended, style-wise, and I had a blast designing jewelry for such lovely girls!
I've created many pieces of jewelry for various brides, and I've even designed an entire set of jewelry for a bride, bridal party, and mother-of-the-bride, but this was the first time creating wedding pieces for someone I knew! I am also friends with all of the bridal party, so I had the opportunity to take their personal styles into consideration.
In addition, I also helped out last minute by being the second shooter at the wedding! I wound up taking over three hundred pictures of the ceremony, photoshoot, and reception.
It's not a fairytale wedding with friends until you do a hilarious gag photo, is it?
The park we took photos had at these awesomely weird concrete frogs...
So... I did mention that this was a group of my friends from high school and that everyone involved are fantastic geeks, yes? While the main photographer was off taking sweet pictures of the bride and groom, the bridesmaids and groomsmen posed with my Lord of the Rings weaponry.
Aren't they just too cute?
Best wishes and lots of prayers for the new Mr. and Mrs.!
It's strange to think that I took Drawing II a full year ago now. Stranger even that I never photographed my work to share on this blog! As of right now, this class is among the top three classes that I've taken at college. The semester was full of experimentation and just pure fun.
I got to draw, for school, for over six hours each week. And, unlike my Drawing I class, I got to choose a lot of the subject matter and style for the projects!
(I've shared artwork from my Drawing I and 2D Design classes in the past, and will continue to post class work on my blog-- you can easily access those posts here).
Below are just a few of the more finished pieces that I made in the class!
The funny thing about this piece is that it isn't a drawing at all-- it's a painting! I was so excited that my projects no longer had to be charcoal still life drawings.
My professor was an older guy who spoke very, very quietly but was always chock full of helpful advice and artists to study.
He also had a great sense of just-go-for-it which I appreciated a lot. It's the style of learning that I was accustomed to from homeschooling and teaching myself art. If you don't think something is impossible, you won't be scared away from trying to succeed at it!
This project was supposed to challenge us in handling color. I painted these flowers in india ink without an underdrawing. Then, I reversed the way I would normally handle color-- and colored in the background with watercolors!
Um... so we also had to draw a skull and glue it on a photocopy of an earlier piece of art. Cue flowers with random skull on it. However, I did have fun with doing reversed colors on the life drawing of the skull.
I was really proud of this one. :)
(Even though when I displayed it for a Portfolio Workshop this semester, two different professors dismissed it as "kitchy" and "too cute" and "ridiculous with all those cartoony trees." The professors in the design department can be so much more opinionated and caustic than those in the art department.)
This is a large colored pencil drawing inspired by photos I took of Pike's Peak. It's a gift for my parents; I took the photographs on a family vacation a few years ago.
Every time I see this piece, I don't think about our Colorado vacation-- I think about Genghis Khan!
We were allowed to listen to our headphones during class. Whenever I am brainstorming or sketching, I like to listen to chill instrumental music. When it comes down to the hard work of doing repetitive details like 2,000 tiny trees, though, I become intellectually bored.
This is why audiobooks and podcasts are so great. I listened to the entire Hardcore History podcast about Genghis Khan while making this piece!
I know I've mentioned it once before on my blog, but my new habit of listening to audiobooks has done wonders for my listening comprehension. I'm slightly hard of hearing (that, or I have a difficult time processing audio), and over the past two years I've gotten much better at being able to focus on things I'm listening to.
This is a two-and-a-half hour study of our little student lounge done in ballpoint pens.
Have mercy on the terribly squished perspective on the chairs. There is no excuse. It's just... there. Drawing from life is hard, my friends.
GUYS I DREW THIS WITH SILVER!
I'm not kidding. This is not done with pencil at all.
I prepped a piece of matboard with rough white wall paint. Then, I bought a small piece of pure silver and inserted it into the body of a ballpoint pen.
The silver scratched the rough painted surface, leaving very light and fine marks behind. After two months, the silver drawing had oxidized to the dark color you see here.
The process is called silverpoint, and it's just one of the many unique techniques that my professor showed us! Artists like Michelangelo used to use silverpoint for sketches, because it was cheaper than pencil lead and less messy than charcoal.
I literally drew Bag End in silver!
This is one of my new favorite techniques, and I'm excited for the chance to do some more illustrations in this style.
It's ridiculously hard to draw babies, especially your very, very little sister whose face looked different in every picture you took. The drawing of "Rose" on the right is much better.
I still have mixed feelings about this piece, but I was grateful for the chance to work with pencil again. I hadn't had the time to work on a large pencil piece since I had made the From the Dragon Hoard drawing in my junior year of highschool. This drawing is nowhere near that quality, simply because I didn't put twenty-plus hours into it!
Hogwarts! In crazy colors!
Ink line drawings and wild watercolors are my new favorite techniques. I took this class a year ago; since then, this style has been my go-to.
The entire thing was drawn with a real quill pen that my professor made himself!
This is a sample piece from the Day of Drawing Wrinkles in Cloth.
The Disney artist Kent Melton had an exhibit at our university for two weeks. We spent two class periods sitting on the floor of the exhibition room with our sketchbooks. I filled my sketchbook with freehand copies of Kent Melton's beautiful animation sketches.
My roommate snagged this picture of me sitting on the dorm floor drawing. She has so much patience to deal with my crazy art student antics!
I forgot to take a picture of this picture when it was finished. I had completed all of the projects for Drawing II early, and spent the last week of class drawing my friend and her fiance. The final drawing had their name and wedding date calligraphied on it.
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Now, I just need to write up a post about my amazing Metals I class, and then I'll be done with updates about my freshman art classes. The ironic thing is that I am writing this just a couple weeks before I complete my sophmore year of college.
When I am caught up in projects that take hours and hours of my time, I easily get lost in the small emotions that come with pouring so much energy into the pieces. A year after making these drawings, I have a much better perspective. This is both the blessing and the curse of being an artist; I am always looking for ways to improve, but I am also my own worst critic!
This winter during a family reunion, I had the honor of doing a maternity photoshoot for my oldest cousin and "cuzzle" (family nickname for cousin-in-law). They are expecting a little boy!
We were working with a time crunch; it was freezing outside and the shoot lasted only ten minutes! Thankfully within that time I was able to find a nice corner of their neighborhood to take pictures in, and they were very willing models! These are a few of my favorites from the day.
The photoshoot went beautifully and since I was able to edit the pictures the same day, my cousins, the new-grandma, and the new-great-grandma all got to sit down in the living room and look through all of the photos together.
Aren't they just the sweetest couple?!
I might start sharing more photoshoots on my blog, since photography is another great passion of mine. Over the past year I've had the honor of doing a couple of senior photoshoots and even being the second photographer at a wedding!
The baby is coming soon, and the whole family is excited for the first wuzzle! (Have I mentioned that my family is crazy? My cousins decided that the new baby would be our "first cousin once removed" and hence would be our first Wuzzle).
1. This "Quick Takes" isn't so quick because there is so much going on!
2. CHRISTMAS!
Christmas break was fantastic. Nothing beats a family as amazing as mine, and I spent the month playing games, having late discussions, making and eating good food, playing with my little siblings, and basically just relaxing.
I did not sleep on an actual bed for eight nights of my break due to traveling and having guests over. It was so incredibly worth it!
One of the best parts?
50 people + 1 house + 1/2 week + board game marathons, good food, talent shows, charades, improv, engineering discussions, baby showers, fire juggling, late nights, dance parties, art lessons, robot wars, and more = MY AMAZING FAMILY!
3. Studio time-- also, I GOT A TORCH!
This Christmas break I had an entire week to spend in my little studio and made a lot of jewelry which will be appearing on my Etsy as soon as I get time to photograph the pieces here in my dorm.
But the best part?
I HAVE A TORCH.
Like, a propane and oxygen torch which gets to a couple thousand degrees and will let me solder, fuse, and melt metal.
I have been having so much fun experimenting and learning. This summer, when I have access to my torch again, I hope to come out with a new line of fine jewelry!
My first big project was developing a puzzle ring! These rings are SO fascinating to me. Expect more on this blog soon. :)
This ring's bezel is too big, but I'm soooo close to getting the hang of this.
I also have been perfecting the electroforming process that I blogged (and despaired) about several months ago. This is a tulip leaf turned copper!
I also made my own etchant with muriatic acid which makes life so much easier for my metalwork. This is a quote booklet I designed! It took forever but I love it. :)
4. Calligraphy
For Christmas, my grandparents gave me a dip pen for calligraphy. I'll be needing it for my illustration classes in the future, but I'm so glad that I got it early because I am experimenting with calligraphy!
When I was younger (somewhere between nine and eleven) I started learning calligraphy using my mom's scrapbooking felt pens.
(My mom isn't very crafty, but the times that she has done crafty activities like scrapbooking and stamping with friends has really served me well by giving me access to awesome craft supplies!)
I had a cheap fountain pen with removable nibs that a friend gave me for my twelfth birthday, but after eight years of use the nibs were worn down. I hadn't really done calligraphy since the last Lord of the Rings poem illustrations I did two years ago.
I think that pointed pen calligraphy is going to be my new favorite thing. This is the first piece I made with that technique (from my instagram).
Pointed pen allows me to get the varying line widths and the cursive-style writing. I just need to practice more!
Also, nerdiness is important, even in calligraphy. This is a piece that I calligraphic with a broad nib. It's in Quenya, Tolkien's Elvish language, written in the Elvish script Tengwar:
5. Visiting a jeweler's.
My grandmother's wedding band was badly damaged recently, and they took it to a jeweler's for repair. This jeweler's isn't your ordinary retail place; they actually design high-end jewelry pieces.
AND I GOT A TOUR!
The family that owns the business was so welcoming and showed me around the entire studio, even letting me watch their mill, laser solderer, and 3D printer in action! And the main jeweler showed me the tiniest little torch head I've seen in my life. The flame is so small that you can only see it under a magnifying glass. I also got to see the inclusions in a real emerald with the magnifying glass!
They sent me home with some sample molds. This is SO AWESOME guys. Went I took at Metals class at my school, it was all with hand tools-- even for the advanced students. For lost-wax casting, students had to use a flex shaft to carve the one-use wax mold by hand.
This studio creates molds in a CAD software (3D modeling) to the customer's specifications. They then either mill a mold and inject it with wax (the left blue ring) or print it with resin in a 3D printer (the red one-- which was a setting for a ginormous stone and I got to try on the real ring!). The molds are then placed in dentist plaster, the wax/resin is melted, and the molten silver, gold, or other metal is poured in.
IT'S AWESOME. And look at how tiny and detailed everything is!
I had this puzzle box that my brother printed in my purse, since I was showing it to my grandpa during that trip. The jewelers were fascinated by it and it led to a really cool discussion about the different kinds of new technologies out there.
Since I love jewelry so much, and love it even more that I've seen a real designer's studio, I started looking around for jobs at jewelers' for the summer since I can't find any graphic design internships. I really hope my leads turn out. Working at a jeweler's would be an amazing experience.
6. 2014 in Books
Farewell, 2014. This is my year in books. It is one of my shortest booklists ever, with giant blocks of audiobooks (and podcasts) representing long drives and homework hours for my art and design classes. I'm a little bit hard of hearing, and I've never been good at understanding people during phone calls. Last year, during my Drawing I class, we were allowed to listen to our headphones. I started listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks. I started off listening to books I've read already, and over 2014 I worked up to listening to new books. I still have a hard time hearing and retaining all of the information, but I can proudly say that I've listened to The Great Gatsby without having read it first and I followed along just fine! Listening to books is a very different experience, but I enjoy having something entertaining/intellectual to do while drawing, and my listening skills have been improving dramatically. I can now follow along with conversations in our noisy dining hall without getting headaches! It's so interesting to go back and revisit these titles and the real-life stories I experienced over this last year. My hope is that over this next year I will have the energy to savor some classics I've always wanted to read. Which of these books have you read and do you have any recommendations for 2015?
7. LOGOS
My painting from my first freshman art class, Fresh Aire, is on the front cover of my university's journal of undergraduate research! The painting was intended as a technical exercise for class, but I took the opportunity to explore the theme of synesthesia.
7. It is January and school has begun!
Last semester was a rough one. Despite having amazing friends and great activities every which way, by the end of the semester I lived each day simply to see it done and mark off items on my "to-do" list. It was a variety of things: having 27 hours of classes a week (plus homework), getting behind on work for my Shoppe, and (most predominately) some very bad experiences with a certain professor.
On the face of the matter, I did well. I'm maintaining a good GPA. I took calculus for the sake of learning calculus and expected to barely pass the class, but thanks to help from my professor and a math-teacher-in-training-friend, I got an A! (Plus it's really fascinating, sooooo...) I was active at my campus ministry, found some time to hang out with friends, and even stayed on track with laundry. In Color Theory, I painted pieces that I am fairly proud of, and in my Literature gen-ed called Heroic Quest I finally had a chance to study and discuss some deep philosophical pieces.
Outward appearances aren't everything, though, and I was restless, overwhelmed, and disillusioned. Praying, thinking, tinkering, reading, writing, and drawing-random-things-in-my-sketchbook took a backseat. Several of my classes were unfulfilling and in many ways a colossal waste of time and money. (My parents ruined me for school by teaching me to love learning; I would much rather get a B in a class that I learned a lot from than a perfect grade because I wasn't challenged). I even became irritated at good friends because I have a hard time saying no and felt a lot of pressure to always be doing things. Put me in a group setting and I will talk to everyone-- but the biggest thing that I learned from last semester is that I need alone time to refocus. (Also I need more than five hours of sleep to keep from panicking).
My biggest goal for this semester is to allow myself to unapologetically take time for myself. It is the times that I feel I should be doing everything that I need to step back. I'm usually not the kind of person to spend five hours on Netflix when I am overwhelmed; I am the kind of person who will just do more things. Jack of all trades, master of none, and a very discontent Jack at that. There are a lot of very good things in my life right now, far outweighing my legitimately stressful problems. Isn't it possible to make the most of every opportunity and also stop to smell the flowers?
