Variations on a theme...

I'm now fully into the design stage of the work now so I have to be a bit sparse in what I show you! So after looking at my own jewellery I left my sketchbook open and just went to it over a couple of days with ideas, sketching them out roughly. I was left with two pages of ideas, narrowed down into a third page of the decent ideas.

Then the actual drawing out of it begins and I've spent two weeks with a crooked neck with a ruler and mechanical pencil painstakingly marking it all out. I pulled out the trusty compass and protractor, putting into use some high school maths (the type I always enjoyed, not algebra!) and making patterns and shapes! 

Some of the designs will have to be built on the computer due to the accuracy needed to make them, whilst others remain with pen and paper for a bit longer.

But the time has come to move on and it's all scanned in now and getting traced over in Illustrator. I've been at it two days and I'm still on the first design. I am panicking. 

I figure I may not get to the laser cutter for the samples as soon as I'd hoped but I may give it to the guys at the product laser cutter so I can get on with other things at the same time.

I see it as a couple more stages after the cardboard mock ups have been made- 

buy acrylic / send off to have cut in acrylic / put together / photograph.

But thing's aren't that simple are they.

I'm concerned I'll have half a collection by the time the final show comes round. But I'll keep going. If it happened like that, it would give me something to continue with after I finish which is better than - finish, now what?!

Meanwhile, yesterday, in a break from drawing lines for a nice pattern that was worth it, I checked twitter and saw that Burhouse Beads had tweeted. I called them up and asked if you had to be a fully fledged business with a VAT number, but they said if I had the receipts from uni for my course fees then I could have an account, yippee!    

I hoped to present my work in a3 folders with pages laid out, but this won't happen. I'll present my sketchbooks in the folders, I need them safe due to the tracing paper copies that are by the dozen. and I'll print out this blog and put it in another folder to see progress.

Anyway, I can't possibly go without showing you something! so here are a couple of the pencil drawings. I'm not showing you my super novel spec design or super duper swirly rectangle plate.