Let's talk about...Jewellery

8th of January today - I registered yesterday for competition and did some design work that I might talk about in more detail in one of my future posts. I've started filing and buffing my castings, figuring out that if I do this at least I will have much less work later on. But back to my competition entries - as you know after last posts I gave myself some time to cool off and look at them with clear eyes. It was good thing too - I realised there was quite a lot of changes - big ones and small that I needed to fix. Dissolve Collection - bracelet that I was working on recently, still isn't fully finished, but I'm not planning to do any more work on Veins.









 I've decided that I didn't like the face after all - I had an inkling that it became too much of distraction , and stud in the ear didn't look realistic enough - I've decided to go much more subtle with inspiration leaving it in the background with veins spreading onto model's back.

First day of New Year 2016 - how exciting! I'll be starting off with updating blog with those promised photos of model printed on Ember and castings from Jewelcast.



As you can see straight away, the quality of model is so much better than Up! printouts. You can make cold-cure moulds for castings out of it as well, but to save money I decided to print models with Solidscape, which allows you to cast directly from model.

 In next post I'm planning to talk about something I've been working on for the past few days - medal for HSBC, so be on the lookout for that and

As you hopefully remember, I want to enter my past and current project to Goldsmiths' competition, so just before Christmas I was working a lot on getting my renderings done (we unfortunately can't get access to Matrix at home due to licensing issues), and getting my head around how to convey movement of my spinning pendant and how to show everything that needs to be shown - inspiration, exploded views and close ups as well as finished renderings on one sheet of A3 paper.
To start off I had a look at jewellery adverts. You might ask why would I look at adverts? Especially considering that it's competition, but if you really think about it, competition is just as much about selling your piece, or design as companies do in adverts, therefore, I felt it was a good starting point.



 Conclusion I came to after looking at these adverts - models. In jewellery adverts there is usually someone to wear the piece. There were some very creative ones from Harry Winston - the one with bird holding rings on its beak, and of course my favourite ones were from Van Cleef & Arpels -they are very clever with their visuals.

I've also looked at how to show movement of my pendant, through use of blur or stills showing moveable section in different positions.
 Then I started thinking about my visuals, and trying to find image  of the model with good resolution.
 Which is harder than it seems, actually - getting right image, so that you can manipulate it in Photoshop so that it looks like someone is wearing necklace and earrings is tricky.

 Originally, bracelet entry was supposed to be similar to pendant - face of the model transforming into object of my inspiration for the piece, but it just didn't look right, so I had to try different combinations out.


That's what I have so far - I'll probably leave it off, so I can look at them with clear eye.

After wonderful Christmas break from work, I'm finally back to work. I still haven't started Uni, but that certainly doesn't mean I'm off the hook, so to get back on track, a bit of recap on what I was working on before Christmas.










 As soon as I take decent photo of model printed on Ember, I'll post it. As a side note I've contacted casting company just before Christmas, and after getting quotation, I've decided to print at School of Jewellery - they have printers working in material you can cast directly from, which is great cause it saves you money you would have to spend on CAD build and cold cure mould. They printed my models on Friday before Christmas, I went to take them down to Jewelcast and I got my castings back on Tuesday before Christmas, so I was very happy about it. Thanks Jewlcast - getting my castings back so quickly was the best gift ever!

Just a quick post today - since last time I was working mainly on refining design of link, getting scale, and size right, making sure pattern is fine and working on joining wire. I printed a lot of models on Up! - some better some not as good, but as it's all part of the process, so far I'm very happy with my progress. Some visuals of my work below.






 So far so good. At the moment I've sent an email to casting company, to check if design is all good to go - I might need to incorporate sprue into design if charge far that would be too much, maybe get model from better quality printer? Also I need to decide on setting I want, although I've been thinking that it link will be cast without it and setting added afterwards - it makes it more commercial, because customer might not want the stone, or have them only in few links...
I might get my laser engraved ring back on Monday, and that would mean that I will be all set to show you series of tasks I had to complete using laser technology. 

I'm quite happy with my progress this week - I did fair amount of CAD work and started printing models using Up! printer. They aren't perfect as Up! is much better for simple stuff and models rather than something as complex as my design. But it definitely gave me something to work from - I know now that I need to make joining wire much thicker and need to work on cut out pattern. But starting with CAD...

I chose one of the link designs and tried T-splines to recreate it - while I felt it was nice to try it out, I felt design was too flat and lacked fluidity. I understand T-splines bit better now, and while I see appeal of it, and how sometimes it's really great, I still feel unsure about it  - when it works great you can do some really good work, but when you have a lot of stuff to fix, it's bit confusing as to where even start.







 As a bit of side note - we have Christmas 3D printed decoration competition, and as part of that I've started doing some simple designs inspired by deer silhouette - and got a chance to print them out as well - I'll have to alter size of antlers as there's one point in which they are very thin, and think about how to hang them - I'll probably print out another one for competition and leave those for my own Christmas tree, because they are just too cute to hide in my sample box!