[ JEWELRY ]

ALIEN – COW ROLE REVERSAL SHRINK PLASTIC JEWELRY

November 29, 2017

 I have this friend, she is a little zany. She has a million ideas and they are all a little different and fun. She has long hair and always wears it up in a bun. She told me one day she would love some fun and silly hair sticks to wear in her hair, like an alien beaming up a cow. I thought it was a fun idea and worked on and off for well over a year with different ideas to make these hair sticks. I tried beads and fimo and wire. Nothing really seemed to catch it and I put it aside for awhile. Then I started working with the shrink plastic and one day *bing* the idea came into my head to make the alien and cow in shrink plastic. Why not?

So I sat down to draw it but realized that the regular alien and cow scenario just wasn’t doing it for me. I needed a twist and that is how the cow abducting the alien came to life!

I inked the pictures onto shrink plastic and came up with this. I then refined it a little, adding some shadows and such. I really love how these came out, they are so fun!

After I was finally satisfied with the piece, I made them into a nice set of hair sticks and gave them to my friend.

She loved them so much she came to me the next week and begged me to make her friend some earrings. I will show you what I made next time 🙂 

A Serious and All Encompassing Bug

So I caught a bug in October. It wasn’t your usual cold and flu thing, no fever and no cough. No, this was something completely different. I caught the knitting bug!

Not only did I catch it, I caught a very bad case of it. I have wanted to knit since I was a teenager. I have tried many times. Each time ending in disaster. I even got as far as making a scarf my last attempt but it was hard and long and I fought it the entire way. I was left with a wonky, sloppy mess that I still wore till it was wearing out but I was not happy with it.

 I joined a facebook group this last month and I am putting this bug squarely on their shoulders. It is a fiber group and suddenly there on my feed, day after day, were all these wonderful photos of the most beautiful work and a lot of it was knitted.   I started to get that itch again, that deep desire to surround myself with skeins of beautiful wool and knit something beautiful. I decided to try one last time. If it didn’t work this time well then, that was that. Only that wasn’t that. 

   I’m not sure what changed. I really don’t understand what happened but this time I picked up the needles and that big ball of squishy yarn and it came to life under my fingers. Suddenly I was knitting away row after row of beautiful stitches with hardly a wonky one among them. I did it!!!

  I started with a simple scarf, I didn’t know what I was doing but I was happy. About 18 inches into it I noticed it was curling and learned from the experts that I couldnt just knit and purl away like that, it would always curl. So I took my first piece apart and made this instead:

Once I finished my first scarf I went on to more colorful projects.  This is my second scarf and I adore it! It is warm and bright and fun. It has quickly become a favorite that I reach for time and time again.

    Now I was completely hooked. I was spending hours drooling over different patterns and yarns. THen I saw entralac. Oh My Goodness! What magic is this? I had to learn. So I set out to learn this elusive stitch and low and behold, I could do that too! 

     With the skills to do that beautiful stitch I made myself a pillow top. 

I just think it is scrumptious! I love it so much. I am really and truly hooked now. 

Next on my agenda was learning to make a hat, so I found a nice slouchy hat pattern and this happened:

 So you can see, I really am truly hooked on this. No telling what I will make next *grin*

Steam Punk Fairy Makes an Entrance

  After finishing Pomp & Circumstance I found myself still yearning to pick up my pencils. I was thrilled with this as I have let them lay dormant for many a year with no desire to visit them at all. That I would find such satisfaction with them again was an exciting thing for me. I quickly set about with a new idea. My daughter had told me she wished a drawing of a fairy some day so that is where the idea for this drawing came from. I decided to draw a fairy but not just any fairy, a steampunk fairy. I wanted her to be bold and yet beautiful also. So this is what I started out with. 

I didn’t really like her face yet, I wanted something more angellic. I finally settled on this face and I am much happier with it.

After I settled on the face I went into a little more detail on her hair. She is starting to shape up!

I am really looking forward to this piece. I think she is going to be a lot of fun. Keep posted to see her come to life.

Hope you have a great and creative week!

Pen & Ink and Colored Pencil Design

This is a post about my recent rediscovery of my love of pencil drawing and the results of my experiments in colored pencil. When I recently did the graphic sketch of the colorful feather I realized just how much I loved drawing and missed doing it. When my son made a comment that he had none of my art to hang on his wall I started mulling over the idea of doing a drawing for him. He has a painting of his father’s on the wall and it is of our old angel fish. Well I love angel fish and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to do a fish also, then he would have one in each of our styles?” So that’s what I decided to do…

 I started out with this peliminary sketch of the fish.

I wanted to do an angel fish but one with lots of swirly very colorful fins. 

After I finished my sketch I inked the body of my fish. 

 Then I began my first layering of color. I have never really done any professional work with colored pencils so I watched a lot of videos on different methods for layering color, etc. I started out with my lightest colors, lay the color down and smoothed it with turpentine. It made a nice painterly effect and I really liked how well it covered this way. 

I then slowly started building up the color. I found this a fascinating process.  I always used only graphite when I worked in pencil when I was younger and I was missing out on a whole world of beautiful colors. The Prismacolor pencils I use are rich and soft and layer beautifully. 

Once the body was done, then the colors really came out. Now I am starting to play! This was such a fun project. I really just let myself go. I found the pencils themselves made me even more creative. The vast amount of color effects I was able to achieve just encouraged me more. I think I spent more time deciding the colors and designs I would use then I did with the actual work but it was all a very fun project!

Initial D Shrink Film Experiment

I was so happy with my rainbow feather piece that I wanted to try this method out again. I loved how the rainbow feather turned out but I felt it was just a bit too detailed, so I set out to simplify the design. I started out with a sketch of an initial D.

I really loved how this sketch turned out. I didnt add the color or fine details in the sketch. I chose to wait until I put it on the plastic. I made up two pieces of the film and tranferred the design onto them for shrinking. I wanted to do one piece with the sharpie markers and one with the prismacolor to compare the two. I immediately made a mistake by tranferring the design onto the wrong side of one of the pieces. I went ahead and finished it anyway though as I wanted to see how it would look with it done on the wrong side. The piece done on the right side is with the colored pencil, the wrong side is the marker one.

So here below are the first two  pieces. The one on the left is the one done on the wrong side. As you can see the colors are very muted. I guess this could be used in some applications but I felt it wasn’t suitable for this application. The second one I thought turned out great. I was so excited about it that I set out to wrap it right away. Silly me! I totally forgot to seal it before I started and before I was even halfway finished with the bezel the ink had rubbed off the front of the piece. The bezel also didn’t work so two fails in one day! 

So I went on to do two more pieces. I was determined to get this piece right. I again repeated the same experiment, one with marker and one with pencil. This time I inked them both on the right side. This time they both turned out great so I went on to seal them. I decided to use the spray sealer to eliminate the brush stroke that were somewhat evident on the rainbow feather. Boy was that a mistake. I am not sure if it would have worked if I had used a lighter touch but what happend was a reaction with the ink  and the sealer. It leaked into the background.Two more pieces regulated to the scrap pile. One good thing though, I can use these with the resin experiments I want to try out as soon as it gets a bit warmer. It is still way too cold up on this mountain for the resin to cure well without using lots of heat in the room.

I was still determined to do this right. I made one more piece. This time with the pencil as I had decided from the previous batches that the pencil looks just a bit better than the marker. Though really it is a close call. They both look quite good in my opinion. So here is the final piece inked and then shrunk.

Finally a good result!  I am still not crazy about the background and would probably be more likely to use this with images that fill the whole piece. I still have to play with this more. What do you think? Do you like the results? Would you wear something like this?