Summer Begins {Rambling and Jewelry}

Sometimes, when I have an overwhelming amount of things to do-- or merely an overwhelming amount of things planned for the future-- I suddenly do not ever want to actually sit down and do it.

This is the case with blogging! What with yet another crazy semester, running a business, and wanting to spend time with friends and family, I have a backlog of a year's worth of pictures to blog about. Literally thousands of pictures sitting on my harddrive, waiting to be shared with the world. A couple dozen custom orders that no one but the client and myself have seen. Footage for six vlogs. Artwork and personal craft projects galore. And five sketchbook pages full of a "To Blog About in the Future" list.

And, now that it is truly summer vacation, I want to do nothing else with my time but to actually make jewelry and art, to go hiking and biking, to play board games with my family, and to spend time with friends.

Today I uploaded twenty new items to my Etsy shop and had my little sister help me with my inventory. She's been wanting to "apprentice," and we've discovered that in addition to having a knack for the technical aspects of jewelry making, she's also got a talent for organizing and helping to manage inventory!

It's just a wee bit overwhelming... everything you see here still needs to be photographed and listed online! You see what I mean; it's hard to know where to start?

Where to start... this evening I will start blogging again by simply uploading these pictures I've been working with for hours. Say hello to all of the new items of the day!

Just in time for summer! This is a fun experiment-- I have a special clay epoxy resin that I am able to color by hand with Gilder's Paste. I use tiny-nosed tweezers to set all of these loose rhinestones into seashells!

Yay pretty seashells!

I simply can't wait for later this summer. I will be seeing an ocean for the first time since I first saw an ocean at age twelve. :)

I've always loved the awesomeness (and cheesiness) of Once Upon a Time the TV show. Awhile back, I made a bright gold glitter necklace with a glass heart-shaped bottle inspired by a scene with Snow White and Prince Charming, and it's been selling well.

So I took that as an excellent excuse for making glitter vial necklaces in other colors. :) Above is a dark gold; below is the deep purple.

I have a lot of Evenstar necklaces and earrings that I never photographed as I mostly was selling them in person. However, since they've been sitting in a box unloved for the entire school year, it was high time to get them online.

I CAN'T FIND ANY MORE OF THESE MONTANA BLUE CZECH GLASS LEAF BEADS!

It's a calamity!

So, a few years ago, when I first started making Evenstars, I bought my Czech beads through Brightlings Beads. This gorgeous reversible iridescent blue was one that I always stocked up on. It's a color that has been pretty popular, and I loved it so much that I used these beads to make some personal jewelry for myself.

I used up my batch of the midnight blue beads a year ago and didn't think much of it. After all, I could just purchase more when I needed to, right?

WRONG.

Everyone-- and I mean everyone, even the very expensive bead suppliers-- seems to no longer carry them. My best guess is that the manufacturer discontinued this color. :(

Just soak in those beautiful deep blues and teals. This may very well be my last Evenstar jewelry set in this color (it's a miracle I found it, in the bottom of a box of beads and not in my offline inventory box). It's up on Etsy, and once it's sold, it's gone. Probably forever. And that makes me veddy sad.

At least there are other gorgeous colors! This is actually the backside of the Pixie Pink Evenstar set, but I love the way that the beads catch pastel blues, purples, greens, and yellows.

It's so fairylike.

It helps that I am listening to the Cinderella movie soundtrack while working on this blog post, and that I am drinking tea with fresh mint from our garden. Small beautiful things that that make everything start to feel like a fairytale.

I even have a Goth black Evenstar... which I really like, even though I can't imagine my inspiration, Arwen from The Lord of the Rings, wearing this particular set.

This purple one is kind of steampunky. :)

There are three more G.K. Chesterton stamped and etched metal book necklaces available. My goodness do these book necklaces take a lot of work. Yet they are my favorite ever. :)

Yay for fairy glitter sparkles; I'm really playing up the fairytale aspect of the jewelry today, aren't I?

Another time and skill intensive piece, the Celtic Puzzle Ring, has been on my workbench lately. Or, rather, my soldering block. Four more of these beauties are ready to find a home!

SEASHELLS! SUMMER! RUNNING ELECTRICITY THROUGH ACID BATHS TO MAKE COOL JEWELRY!

...I just really like summer and dangerous power tools.

This seashell was electroformed (coated with copper), oxidized and sanded (to darken the ridges) and sealed before being strung on a bronze chain.

Well, I can't seem to get the "Mermaid Seashell" rhinestone pictures into this blog post, but here's the one with a glitter ombre.

Oh, hey, another seashell picture finally uploaded! My favorite small one, with blue-ombre with pink, teal, and green rhinestones!

Another item that I've been making was inspired by a college friend who made something similar... miniature rosary bracelets!

Most rosary bracelets are single-decade, meaning that they have only ten beads, or they are wrap-around bracelets.

These are actual full five-decade miniature rosaries that are worn like bead bracelets! I've been using my dad's drill press to add extra holes to the crucifixes to make this possible.

The only downside is that the length isn't adjustable. This one is bigger-- 8 full inches-- but the smaller beads make small bracelets.

So, there you are-- most all of the new jewelry I've added to Etsy today.

Have a great summer, and I hope to blog more soon!

Toodles,

Shaylynn

Autumn Wedding Jewelry Ensemble

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.! 

Drawing II

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.

______

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!