Sunday, February 17, 2013

Pendants

Lion and Tiger pendants, oil and acrylic on exotic wood fragments, framed with silver-filled wire wrap.
I've finally settled on a design for the pendants I've been working on, and here are a couple of the first examples - these are handpainted fine art miniatures on exotic hardwood fragments, with a silver-filled wire wrap.  Now to make more of these!

Jewelry design copyright L. Merchant

Friday, February 8, 2013

Evolution - Sneak Peek

A time comes, periodically, for an artist to put down the usual work and go in a completely different direction. It doesn't mean that the old work is finished, necessarily, but that for the work to improve new skills need to be learned.

I seem to do this over New Year's every year, and this year it happened again. I had an idea for a project, but lacked the skills to pull it off. I wanted to paint miniatures and make them into jewelry pieces. Painting small isn't really a problem for me, but what about making the actual jewelry fittings? What about the substrate, how could I make the piece unique and special? With a little help from my gallery friends (Thank you, you know who you are!) I learned a bit of metalworking, and a bit of woodworking.

These aren't done yet, and I haven't posted in a while because I wanted to improve on the idea first - but at least you can see where I'm going with this. Hopefully soon I'll have some awesome pieces to show. :)

Oil paintings in miniature, on repurposed hardwood offcuts, framed in copper and silver.