Let's talk about...Jewellery

It's possible that I didn't talk about it previously, but I decided against making bracelet from Dissolve Collection, with main reasons being the cost of production and time - that's why for final piece I've been making pendant. It's been quite a long process, and... Well maybe I'll start with some visuals:






 As you can see it's pretty much done - nothing is as satisfying as seeing your design come to life - feel its heaviness, how solid it is...
As a side note, I've completed laser welding task, so I can finally share with you what it was about. We received the same cast ring with missing claws (at least some of them were, but majority was just cast too well) and we were to drill a hole for silver wire to thread through, laser weld it, and fill two last holes on the shoulders. It was pretty straightforward, and not too difficult (although because of the way welder is positioned, I found it difficult to reach properly inside it, leading me to believe that my arms are too short).


As to laser welder - it allows you to join two same metals together - works great with
gold, steel and silver - other metals - I haven't tried, but I heard they are more difficult to fuse together. So it's pretty much soldering, but without torch, flux and solder. Solder doesn't work well with laser welder. During welding, you put your piece and arms inside chamber, look through sockets to see it from close up, and using centre of the cross on the socket, you press pedal to turn laser beam on - a bit like sewing machine. Laser beam fuses two edges - if that's what you wanted to achieve, or fills in holes. To fill in hole, you need finest filler wire from the same material as the piece you try to fill in and position it so it's at an angle (laser beam stays in the same spot, going straight down). It's great when you need to weld small pattern, or entrap heat sensitive material - like a pearl. A great tool to have - I wish I had one at home.

 That will be all for today - be on the lookout for the next post!

As part of the business module we are to develop an icon (logo) for our future business.
I've started research with looking at existing logos of brands I admire - Fei Liu, Stephen Webster and Theo Fennel.
All three of these logos are simple - initials blended into one symbol on a neutral background.

After a very long and eventful period of my absence I'm happy to say I'm back! It's been busy time for me - finishing off laser project, starting a business module and to top it off finishing entries for Goldsmiths' competition - no wonder that with so much happening, my immune system refused to cooperate and I had set back of few days with really bad cold...But since last Monday I've been back in the game, and I'll start with updating regarding my entries for Goldsmiths and HSBC Time capsule project.

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.

I'm going all out today, to get as much blog updates as possible, so here it is. The new and exciting HSBC Time Capsule Competition.
What is it? Well maybe a bit of background to it.

 So I wasn't sure about partaking, but it is such a huge opportunity, to not only design for client as big as HSBC, but also go down in history - plus you are expected to use ArtCam, which as you know, I love a lot. So I started some development...








So far so good - it's definitely a busy holiday, but I can't say that I'm bored!

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

Since I finally have photo of my laser engraved ring, I can finally talk about laser technology introductory tasks I had during the first week of the project. I won't talk about laser scanning, cause I don't have any pictures from that and laser welding - mainly because I haven't finished that task yet.

To start off - laser cutting is a technology allowing you to cut material - mainly sheets of plastics, wood, textiles and metals - according to your design. It allows fairly big precision, but there are some rules to remember. Laser recognizes lines depending on colour. Red is for cutting, black for raster and blue for engraving - at least that's how our school laser works. For that task we were to design Christmas decoration for cutting in clear perspex - either flat or 3D one. I decided straight away to design a snowflake in Rhino. Below, the last one on the right is my final file ready for cutting.

And below my lovely snowflake - it was good thing that I designed with consideration for hanging, as the slot for some reason came out too big. Thankfully, pretty blue ribbon sorted everything out!

 For laser sintering we were to design singular form in T-splines (which I like slightly better, but not enough to leave ArtCam). Direct metal sintering is slightly similar to printing, in how it works layer by layer - the difference is, you can work directly in metal, and instead of nozzle heating up plastic to layer up, here the machine spreads layer of powder (for example gold) and laser traces the shape of your design melting powder to form solid form. And it repeats and repeats until whole product is created - it's quite a long process, especially if the piece is large or complex. It allows you to create forms you couldn't do easily with casting, as well as make chains or bracelets as you can design links already joined - as long as you leave some space for the powder to be blown away, at least. The thing to remember is - the finish is not as good as with casting, so with more complex forms you might not be able to polish fully. The last 3 images from bottom right is my tiny model sintered in nylon by Digits 2 Widgets - London based company.

 Last but not least - laser engraving task was to design pattern for ring using Coral Draw, buy or make silver, flat ring and take it to laser engraving company - Geti (they are located in Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham). Laser engraving is pretty much engraving with laser - you can either engrave 3D form or 2D flat engraving which is what we were doing. My design was magpies - because they are one of my favourite birds. I'm very happy with my ring - the level of detail one can achieve with laser engraving is incredible!