'Shades of Green' sketches

oops, meant to add these before my last post...

The following pictures are just little sketches from my design book. They show ideas I have on how to set my sea objects so that the detail behind them is still visible...

'Green' pendant

For this exhibition I plan on making a few pieces of jewellery that I hope would increase peoples awareness of their natural surroundings, by using natural materials. For the first piece I am using a piece of dried coral that I will set and make a pendant...



The two photos below show the open setting I am making for the coral. The nice thing about taking part in this exhibition is that I can work my theme for my B-tech into it. I was really hoping to use all the bits and pieces I pick up when I walk along the beach, and this gives me a great opportunity to. At the same time I will stick to my concept of making the backs of my pieces as interesting, or even more interesting, than the fronts.

'Shades of Green' exhibition

For the 'Shades of Green' exhibition being hosted at Artisan Contemporary Gallery, we have been asked to submit pieces of work that explore the topic of 'going green'. This can be done either in the way we manufacture our jewellery, or the visual message we are creating through our pieces, or even just using the colour green.

An example of 'green' jewellery is that of Ana Hagopian. She uses recycled paper to create these bright colourful rings...

Erica Leal

while looking through the Carrotbox blog I came across a ring manufactured by Erica Leal. Although her style is different to mine, she has managed to make a 'miniature sculpture', not just a piece of jewellery. A lot of the detail and focus is on the under side of the ring, which is a concept I have been exploring with my own jewellery...

watercolour & resin?

After using my watercolour paintings at Design Indaba, where i placed clear perspex over them to display my jewellery on, I would like to play around with the idea of settings filled with resin ontop of a section from a watercolour painting... hopefully the resin will give the painting that same vitreous surface appearance that the perspex did.

more watercolours...

I explored these little barnacles I found on the beach by photo copying them, and increasing their size...

The photo below shows the ridges of the barnacle up close...

To recreate these ridges and patterns of the barnacle, I used a wax candle as a resist and then painted over with colours that i feel represent the ocean. I slightly tilted my paper so that the colours would pool, and some sections would be richer in colour than others.


These watercolour squares were used in my display Design Indaba. I placed perspex over each one and used that as a platform for my jewellery.

Playing with watercolours

To explore my subject matter/references more closely, i decided to look at sections of them, and then paint it...
The photo below shows one of my favourite pictures, burrowing clams. I looked at the shapes around the edges of the clams, and the detail on the inside of them...