Niky Sayers Artisan Jewellery: art

31.7.18

July Art Elements Challenge

July's Art Elements Theme Challenge was chosen by our wonderful and talented Jen Cameron and was seed pods.
As soon as I learnt of the theme I started to collected all the different seed pods that I came across, but I had no idea what I was going to make and found it hard to get started.

I decided to try some thing easy to begin with and made this copper fold formed seed pod with Jen's beautiful lamp work head pins bursting out....

Then once I saw Claire's fantastic polymer clay tutorial on the Art Elements Blog I decided that I needed to try making some of those, I did not unfortunately get to Finnish these as I am very easily distracted and they need a few more coats of paint....

The polymer clay got me thinking, oh how about moulding tiny seed pods and recreating them in silver metal clay?!?

I looked for the smallest I could get my hands on but with the best textures and heres what I came up with....

I started to add gems and beads to see what I could create with the metal clay pods but in the end they just looked much better on there own so I made them into simple earrings, the studs have a wonderful star type pattern.

Then I wanted to try some art work, I really like the idea of painting and drawing but always find it hard to get started! So on these ones I used parts of the seed pods and either stuck them on to the page or used them and some acrylic paint to print on the page, these were experiments and need a bit more work but as I was making the "helicopter" seed pod piece I was distracted by how much they looked like dragonfly wings so then I made this....

Not seed pods but seed pod inspired, I made a water cooler background (I had much too much fun doing this and may have made 50 or so water colours splats) and used the helicopter pods and some acrylic paints to print the wings and drew a very simple dragonfly and added some more water colour, I rather like this one!

Thank you Jen for inspiring us all this month, I can't wait to see what everyone else has created...

Guest Artists:

Tammy

Raven

Alysen

Anita

Cat

Kimberly

Rozantia

Art Elements Team:

Jen

31.5.18

May Art Elements Blog Hop - Tide Pools

Yet another month over in the blink of an eye!
May's theme was chosen by the wonderful and very talented Lesley Watt and was Tide Pools or Rock Pools as we call them over here.
When I think of rock pools I always think of sea anemones, I have never seen any in the wild, only ever in the sea life centre, but thats where my mind heads straight to.
While searching through my stash (as often I do while looking for inspiration) our wonderful Jen's Lampwork headpins kept screaming out "I look like a sea anemone caught in a water bubble what more do you want?" the original idea was a wide band ring with the head pin at the middle surrounded with silver rocks, but some how I got distracted and the idea transformed into a pendent....

I tend to be easily distracted! The main stone has a hole drilled through the centre and the headpin (which is set in a 9ct gold bezel) and "rocks" (which are all soldered together as one piece) have been set as you would set a stone on stone. The actual stone has then been set in a very thick sterling silver prong setting.
I then had another idea I wanted to make a rock pool, not an actual rock pool but a tiny little metal ring dish inspired by rock pools....

I started off by gathering some of my sea stones, shells and sea glass that had interesting patterns on it and then I added in a few tiny fossils (I'm thinking rock pool in the Jurassic Coast, in Devon a place that is on my bucket list to visit) I then made a fimo texture plate with these pieces and tested it on the fimo before breaking open the metal clay.

Unfortunately I have not gotten around to firing the metal clay pieces yet, but I did experiment more with the fimo pieces (why dose spell check keep correcting fimo to limo? what even is limo?) pieces and I was really pleased with how they came out....

These are the little cabs I had made, these have each had several layers of water colour paint and one of them has even had a layer of resin, which I plan to do to all of them, but I ran out as I used the last of my resin on my little ring dish....

I really love this piece and it turned out much better then I expected, again it is coloured with many layers of water colour paint that pooled into the recesses, a few coats of matt varnish and then a thick coat of resin.

I love how much it looks like ceramic and am planing to make a little metal stand for it, possibly out of a domed coin with three soldered rocks for legs!

I had so much fun this month, Thank you Leslie for inspiring us!

I hope you will all join me in hopping around the other blogs....

Guests

Raven

Kelly

Cat

Kathy

Tammy

Alyson

Elaine

Mischelle

Deborah