Resin and painting pendant

I had the idea to make a necklace for a Christmas present for a friend of mine. She is an illustrator and paints horse and dog portraits (you can see her work on her website here) so I thought it would be nice to embed one of her works in a pendant. After finding an image I thought would go well I had to print and seal it before embedding it inside a pewter pendant bezel and once it had fully cured I hung it on a purpley-aubergine ribbon necklace.

The first picture shows the whole necklace (with a small pink star on the extension chain) And the second is a close up of the pendant itself. I hope she liked it!

Progress and award

It's been a really busy week so I've not been able to update my facebook page yet this week and I'm late posting this (well late by my self-imposed aim to blog at least once weekly!)

But I'm happy as even without it my facebook page fanbase is steadily creeping up, I'm at 89 fans now and I'd planned to do announce a giveaway when I was close to 100 so keep your eyes peeled!

I had another good surprise, last week Minky Magic (maker of lovely vintage inspired accessories) awarded me with my first blog award, the Sunshine Award is awarded to bloggers whose positivity & creativity inspires others in the blog world. I was delighted to recieve this so early into my blogging experience.










The rules for accepting this award are:
Put the logo on your blog or within your post,
Pass the award onto 12 bloggers,
Link the nominees within your post,
Let the nominees know they have received this award by commenting on their blog,
Link to the person from whom you received this award.

So after catching up with the blogs I follow I have decided to pass the award on to:
Created and Felted,Niche Handmade,Mini Felts,Not Just Handbags, Giddy Stuff, Team Awesome, Monkey & Squirrel, Itty Bitty Ninja Kitty, Haptree and Me, Experimentalk, Carl Martin Jewellery, Aviya Glass
Enjoy!

Stuck with photography so here's some t-shirts!

Trying to sort out the photos to be able to list items for sale online is giving me a headache so I thought I'd distract myself (and post something contructive!) by putting up some of my commisioned t-shirt designs. These ones were done for a local martial arts school, a couple of one offs and the main club t-shirt. All were done with heat applied vinyl.






Unlike screen printing, which has high set-up costs, using vinyl means it's possible to do one-off designs and small runs which would just work out too expensive otherwise. Also you can get nice effects like metallics, glow in the darks, glitter, patterned, sparkles etc. The standard club t-shirt (left) is metallic gold on black.

One drawback to using vinyl is it's harder to do multicoloured designs as you can't do shades only blocks of colour. If you look at the Matador t-shirt (the first picture) you can see it's made up of three shades of red and a tan colour. (NB. This image actually shows a black as well but as the final design was applied on a black t-shirt the t-shirt itself was used for the background colour. This image is a mock-up).

6 inspiring paper artists

How people interact with physical designs is a big area of interest to me, when studying product design it was relatively easy to see how to consider this with actual physical products, but in my graphic design work it's a harder matter as you are mainly dealing with simple 2D materials (posters, flyers etc). Because of this I became interested in pop-ups, and through researching these realised that the world of making 3d forms from paper was a lot wider and exciting than i first thought.

Pop-ups, origami, kirigami, paper architecture, paper illustration, Mon-kiri, scherenschnitte, paper art...there is no one term that can cover the variety of facets in this field. Below I've compiled a very short list of some of the most inspiring artists/craftmens in this field. Hope you like it!

Eric Joisel
Amazing paper sculptures that almost look like they've been carved from stone. The root of Joinsel's work lies in origami, and the "Creating Process" section on his website shows how complex the folding pattern are. Amazingly most of his figures are created from single sheets of paper.









Jen Stark
Instead of folding, Jen Stark's paper art uses a technique of cutting through stacks of coloured paper to produce sculptures reminiscent of wormholes and fractal patterns.









Peter Callesen
A combination of paper folding and cutting (origami and kirigami) give Peter Callesen's works a feeing of delicate fragility. He uses the basic white A4 sheet to produce the majority of his creations.








Rob Ryan
Rob Ryan's impossibly intricate paper cuts contrast romantic images with the darker sentiment of the words carved within them.











Ingrid Siliakus
Taking inspiration from the founder of this particular type of paper art Masahiro Chatani, Ingrid Siliakus uses the complex art of cutting and folding to create precise architectural forms. Unlike origami where several sheets of paper can be used in paper architecture the intricate models are made from just one sheet of paper so cuts have to be carefully calculated.










Yulia Brodskaya
A graphic designer, Yulia has developed a unique style using cut and curled paper to make colourful, flowing typographic illustrations.

Setting up to sell online to do lists!

Trying to get ready to get items listed up online for sale but there so much to do and it can be a bit like the chicken and the egg....what to do first, what's better done when there's actually listings up.

I'm concentrating on setting up on Etsy first, even though it's a US based site (and so all transactions are in dollars) it seems to be the busiest handmade marketplace and where most people seem to get most success. So my logic is - is everything's set up on there then it should be easy to transfer to other marketplace sites. So currenty my to do list includes:

- research and write shop policies (shipping, returns etc)
- write descriptions for around 5 items to start me off
- photoshop the rest of the item photos ready for listing
- design and make packaging and basic business cards to send out with orders
- make a spreadsheet that lets me work out selling prices and also allows me to track etsy, paypal and postage fees
- sort out a paypal account

and that's before I start on getting t-shirt designs and other items made. My main problem at the minute is getting bogged down in researching things (like shipping policies etc), I need to stop reading and start writing! Plus I'm still trying to get some belated Christmas presents for friends made up too.

Here's a pair of transformers cufflinks I made for a friends birthday, I'm quite happy with the way they turned out, and some of my lastest batch of resin bits and bobs waiting to get polished up...