Latest Commision...

As well as the jewellery I make for Deviant Panda I also take on commissions. My latest commission was a charm bracelet for a Christmas present. The brief was to create a charm bracelet with a Chinese influence incorporating the Chinese Zodiac symbol of the monkey.

I started by painting wooden beads with a black base with red Chinese lettering on top representing the words Happy, Joy, Love, Luck, Money and 'Have Fun'. I painted two more wooden beads with a black base followed by small flowers on one and gold and red trellis on the other. I varnished them all with a glossy varnish and threaded them onto silver wire finishing with red glass cubes and jade effect beads.

Then I upcycled some charms I had from an old bracelet I was given years ago and created a new charm from a Chinese coin I obtained from a trip to China earlier this year.

The last task was create a jade effect monkey charm so using a mixture of greens, white, black and translucent polymer clay I set to work creating jade. This was something I have never tried before but I loosely followed the instructions given in Donna Kato's The Art of Polymer Clay until I managed to get a consistency I was happy with. I flattened the blob of clay and started to carve out the basic shape of the monkey, continuing to sculpt the finer details. Once I was happy with the monkey I added some detailing, said a quick prayer and popped it in the oven. I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome which goes to show that following a recipe seems to pay off! :) I varnished the monkey once it had cooled, attached all the charms to the bracelet and proudly presented it to my very happy customer.

I'm always happy to take on commissions so if you have something in mind just get in touch either via folksy, facebook or twitter (the links to my sites are all around the page) or leave a comment for me on this blog. I hoped you liked the pictures of the bracelet as much as I enjoyed creating it! :)

Til next time,

DP

Sugar Skulls and other inspirations... pt 2

I have recently found some time on my hands (at last) to write the concluding part of my inspirations for my Dia de los Meurtos Collection. This has come at a price as I have a nasty little ulcer on my right cornea, a result of a speck of dirt wriggling it's way under my contact lens and becoming rather bothersome. A trip to A&E and 2 types of eye drops should hopefully clear the little bugger up soon. I wear contacts for vanity reasons and vanity, my friends, always seems to come at a price. So between hourly eye drops and several breaks away from the screen (my eye still isn't quite up to staring at a computer screen for hours on end just yet) here we go...

Since I was very small I remember being enthralled by manga and anime. I remember a trip to Brittany when I was about 5 where I was first introduced to anime by way of a french-dubbed cartoon. I couldn't tell you want the cartoon was but the style of drawing was something that I'd never seen before and I was fascinated by it.

Skip forward 6 years and to a slumber party at my best friends house where her older brother introduced me to Akira, a groundbreaking film which pulled anime over into the western mainstream. From that moment on I was obsessed. As a teenager growing up in London I would take myself off to Chinatown to buy Hello Kitty keyrings (this was before it was widely available in every high street shop on everything from bubblegum to children's underwear) and My Melody stationery. I still have some of those original purchases with their original Japanese packaging!

I'd go to Forbidden Planet to buy Sailor Moon and Urusei Yatsura manga. I loved Chibi Moon and the kawaii-ness of it all. Whilst at university I even wrote my dissertation on the shift of influence between the East and West focusing on anime and manga to argue my point. Let's just say that some of my predictions from 2002 have materialised, you can call me Pythia if you like! :)

As a result of being a fully paid up fangirl from an early age these influences have crept into my work. I've always leaned more towards the abstract but in the last few years I have become more and more influenced by Japanese art and design. One of my big inspirations is vinyl figures - designer toys if you will. One of my favorite books on the subject is Full Vinyl by Ivan Vartanian, a look at the history of the vinyl toy phenomenon featuring some of the most exciting pieces of subversive toy culture. One of my favorite designers is Junko Mizuno (her manga are pretty cool too) although KAWS is a pretty big influence as well.

Another recommended read is RackGaki - Japanese Graffiti by Ryo Sanada and Suridh Hassan. I am a big fan of Esow, Sasu and Tenga featured in this book.

I don't know what it is exactly that I love about all of these designers, artists and images. As a visual person I find it hard to describe exactly what bit I like and where in my work you can see the influence. Instead I'd rather give you the starting points and images to look at and make up your own minds.

Although this is focused at trying to explain the influences behind the Dia de los Muertos collection to be honest these influences will stay with me in all my work, I love them too much to abandon them in pursuit of the next big thing. So expect more tales of weird toys and pretty graphics to feature as time goes by!

Until the next time, sayonara!

DP

Something for the weekend...

Well it's been a long week, but it's the weekend now! Seemed like would never get here! In a week thats been clouded by politics and policy, added to the weather getting colder and the nights drawing again once more I've been keeping myself focused by tinkering about with ideas for jewellery.

I've got a couple of things in the pipeline at the moment, the first of which is earrings. I've worn my own designs for years now, especially skulls. I'll be making stud skull earrings and the skull drop style earrings I wear alot myself.

Along with earrings I have also been painting beads to make into necklaces. Some of the beads I have been painting at the moment are decorated with flowers which is a bit of a departure from the skulls which dominate my current collection, but I have strung them alongside beads coloured with the shades of the rainbow in keeping with my bright, fun aesthetic.

I think these bead necklaces will be a softer, more feminine side of Deviant Panda that people haven't seen so far! I'll keep you posted with these new items and any other ideas other the next few weeks, maybe sooner, and I'm going to be posting the concluding part of my inspirations for the current jewellery collection I have in my shop very soon!

Have a good weekend!

DP

Skull Mobile Charm - special offer!

Evening all!

This is just a quick post to draw attention to a special offer I'm currently running. As you may know from one of my previous posts I made 30 skull mobile charms to put into LBOC's Christmas sample bags. Afterwards I decided to make up a load to sell in my shop as they are so cute!

They are quite competitively priced at £3.60 each (I price using Chris Parry's amazing spreadsheet! I'd be lost without it and recommend it to any fellow crafters/sellers) but best of all I'm giving one charm away FREE with every order over £10. Just click on the picture to go to the link.

You can choose from 10 different colours: Emerald Green, Leaf Green, Sunny Yellow, Mandarin Orange, Cherry Red, Deep Purple, Royal Blue, Aqua, Black & White!

Enjoy!

DP

Little Book of Crafters Christmas Edition

Two posts in (nearly) two days?! I'm a blogging demon! :)

I wanted to tell you about the Little Book of Crafters today.
I found out about LBOC via Folksy and I decided to submit some free samples to the LBOC Christmas Edition. Mimi @ LBOC puts together sample bags to give away at her stall at craft fairs and this year is her first Christmas edition.

I decided to submit 30 mobile skull phone charms as they are quite small and lightweight, perfect for a little goodie bag. I have loads of skull charms made ready to go on my charm bracelets so I took 30 aside and started to paint them.

After painting them I varnished them with a glossy glaze to make them durable. They looked like jelly beans! Yum!

Once they were dry I attached each charm to a mobile phone strap - very, very fiddly but they looked very cute once I was done. Then I tied each one to one of my mini business cards which doubled as a label. Job done! I was pretty chuffed with the results.

I've sent them off to Mimi @ LBOC and I'll keep you posted with the results.

You can join LBOC's facebook page here!

DP

Busy Sunday afternoon...

It's been a busy day today, not of making, but of promoting and marketing. I recently won a free advert in Creative Crafting Magazine's Christmas issue! I was absolutely over the moon, I've never won anything before so it was a lovely surprise when I opened up my inbox and I saw the message from Avril and Anna at the magazine.


To get my advert in there I had to send them a 250x250 pixel sized graphic and the website address of my choice. I spent a few hours choosing images and figuring out how I wanted the finished item to look. I used Gimp 2.0 to manipulate the image (Gimp is amazing, a totally free, alternative to Photoshop). In the end I choose this image to link to my folksy page:

I really enjoy graphic design; I studied basic computer aided design briefly at Uni but I'm mainly self taught. I like experimenting and manipulating images, but I find it easy to get sucked into it! I could sit for hours using Gimp!

After finishing my advert I decided to overhaul the front of my folksy shop. When I first started there I didn't realise that the order of the items was dependant on the order that I uploaded them. Apparently Folksy are working on a way to be able to drop and drag your items around, but for now I had to relist them. I don't mind doing that too much and I'm much happier with the way it all looks now. :) Feel free to have a look at the shop and let me know what you think. Now I'm off to bed (it's Monday morning already....oops! :) )

DP

Sugar Skulls and Other Inspirations...pt 1

So, as mentioned previously, I thought I'd write about the inspirations behind my current collection of jewellery. It's called Día de los Muertos so there is a big clue in title already about what to expect, but first I think I should go back to the beginning and why I wanted to make it.

When I started to think about what jewellery I wanted to make, my first thought was 'what did I want to wear?' - I wanted to make something that I myself would be happy to wear. Now I'm not a fan of delicate, elegant jewellery - I'm not saying that I don't appreciate a timeless thing of platinum-diamond-infused beauty, but to wear it myself? Well it just isn't me. I like big, bright, colourful, jewellery. I've got a growing collection of Tatty Devine jewellery if you need anymore clues as to the sort of thing I mean. But as wonderful as TD is I still wanted to wear something else, something that I couldn't find in the shops. I wanted something colourful, bright, and cute. But I also wanted it to have an edge - no butterflies and unicorns for me, I like wierd stuff, skulls, demonic teddy bears* and such like. So let's start with the first and biggest inspiration: Día de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead festival.

The Day of the Dead festival is celebrated on 2 November to remember and pray for deceased friends and relatives. Offerings are made at shrines and usually consist of sugar skulls, flowers, food and drink. DayOfTheDead.com is a really good website to go to if you want more info on the history of the celebration, and contains beautiful pictures in it's 'gallery' section. Since I was a child I've been fascinated by this festival as although it's focused on death it celebrates it in a fun and colourful way. It's about honouring those who have passed on but not in a solemn, gloomy way.

The thing that has always stuck in my mind though are the sugar skulls. They are so bright and colourful; there is so much detail on them. They take what is quite a scary looking object and make it fun and exciting. I wanted to use this element of fun and bright colours, but with a twist in my jewellery.

I now knew that I wanted to incorporate skulls into my designs along with the bright colours of the festival, but Dia de los Muertos wasn't the only thing on my mind when I started to design. In my next post I'll be discussing some of the other inspirations.

*Check out Gloomy Bear, like I said, weird stuff. :)

An introduction

First of all, welcome to my blog! It's my first so don't expect any slick operation, this is just me in my living room and my trusty laptop and a handful of html codes. This is going to be a learning experience complete with a steep learning curve no doubt!

I wanted to blog for a few reasons:

Numero Uno - I make jewellery in my spare time and I wanted to write about that, show people what it's all about, where the inspiration comes from and maybe even how I do it.

Second, I enjoy writing and communicating with others. I like to have a good old chat and a blog is somewhere where people can express ideas and promote discussion. I also have a tendancy to ramble on when I get into an interesting subject so if you can bear with me hopefully you'll find something in here that sparks off your own curiousity or gives you inspiration!

Last but not least, I wanted to have something that documents all the creative bits and bobs that I do. I have a full-time non creative job and it can be difficult to remember all the cool, fun, creative things you do and think of when you are sat in front of a computer all day with a pile of paperwork to get through.

So enough of that, what is this all about and where to start???

Well, as you may have gathered, I make jewellery in my spare time. But not your run-of-the-mill pretty diamonds and hearts jewellery, oh no no no, as my shop says I "make jewellery of an unusual nature". At the moment this means I have a collection of jewellery inspired by the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration on offer, all skulls and rainbow colours. Shameless plug time: Wanna have a look at this amazing jewellery of which I speak? Visit Deviant Panda for more details! Ha! See how I segued into a link to my shop there? Okay maybe I lied when I said this wasn't going to be a slick operation coz I thought that was pretty slick...seamless you might say! :) But enough shameless plugging! I make jewellery and I love it, ALOT!

I'm currently being inspired by trashy B-movies, schlocky horror films, Voodoo, death rituals (as in the Mexican Day of the Dead), kawaii manga and anime and collectable vinyl figurines.

I'll leave it at that for now as I don't want to bombard anyone with information overload just yet, but in my next post I will be exploring the inspirations behind my current jewellery collection.

DP