Bead Arts

Have you ever thought about selling your designs? Not the finished product, but the designs themselves? Here’s how one designer decided to go about it:

Creating and selling jewelry tutorials

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media, tutorials

Color Scheme: So many colors, so little time

Color is one of the basic elements of design, and many designers start off with just knowing that they want to make something purple. Or green. Or green and gold. Choosing your color scheme first is a perfectly natural pathway into designing. You might find that making your color decisions overlap your decisions about focal point or theme. Sometimes the focal point and color scheme develop together, one from another. Other times your theme will suggest or limit a color scheme. And still other times…you just simply want to make something purple. It’s all good. Usually I will choose the focal piece first and let the color scheme develop from that, but I’ve certainly also been known to do it the other way around.

This piece is an example. I was participating in a year-long project headed up by Dulcey Heller and Mary Elter, called Bead Art Exploration. One of our assignments was to pick a color scheme that we wouldn’t normally use.

Nomadic Treasure

We all have our favorite colors and color schemes, but sometimes it’s nice to stretch a bit and see what else is possible. I have discovered that, using my focal piece to start, I will most naturally gravitate toward a monochromatic (tints, tones, shades, and pure color of a single hue) or analogous (several hues in close proximity on the color wheel) scheme if I make the choices intuitively. These are just combinations that I find naturally attractive. I will usually add a metallic color or a neutral (black, white, or grey) which best suits the warm or cool undertones of the main colors. But in the case of Nomadic Treasure, I chose to use a triadic scheme. Ouch! It didn’t feel natural at all, but I liked the results.

Another method I have used to choose colors is to take my cue from a painting that I admire. Not surprisingly, the color scheme still most often ends up being monochromatic or analogous! I like to have a lot of textural interest in my work, but to avoid a cluttered look, and I’ve always felt that these two schemes allow me to achieve that. Still, it’s fun to play sometimes.

In another attempt to stretch my safe and predictable color schemes, I read a book that I would highly recommend to everyone: Exploring Color, by Nita Leland. Although it was written for painters, Leland gives wonderfully clear explanations (with glorious full-color examples) of different color schemes and also of different ways of achieving contrast through color choices. Leland points out that the color wheel palette you use does not have to be based upon primary hues. The wheel could consist instead of tints, earthy shades, high intensities, muted tones, transparents, opaques, etc. Maybe this will seem obvious to you, but since I’m not primarily a painter, and was raised on the primary color wheel in school, this was very exciting stuff to me!

designing, creativity, tutorials

Theme: Your guiding concept
Suppose that you have an idea or a concept that won’t leave you alone…you just must design something with that theme in mind, but you can’t find the notion of theme on your list of design elements and principles? Never fear, theme is a wonderful potential pathway into designing. Many many of my necklaces started out as a concept or theme, and then hung around my brain or notebook just waiting until the right focal pieces and materials fell into place. I made several Hand of G-d necklaces that started out this way. Here’s one:

For Such a Time As This

I knew what I wanted this necklace to convey long before I had the items to make it. In this case, I made the focal beads specifically for the necklace, after having chosen the name and all the symbols that would be included, including the colors.

When you chose to enter a contest, you are often called upon to create something to fit a theme. This is a great way to stretch your creativity, but you can easily set your own concept challenges. Practically anything that is important to you, from the sublime to the ridiculous, can be the inspriation for a conceptual piece of jewelry. The grandeur of the earth and heavens, or the minute detail in a seashell…Creation itself is very inspiring to many artists. Places you’ve traveled to, especially places much different from home. Favorite hobbies and pass-times. Lines from a favorite poem. Verses of sacred scripture. Family and pets. Ancient, antique, or ethnic styles. Look anywhere and everywhere for the things that stir your soul.

We’ll be continuing this series on Design next week, with color scheme on Wednesday, materials on Thursday, and structure on Friday.

designing, creativity, tutorials

CoolToolsVideos has a number of good shorts on YouTube that teach Precious Metal Clay techniques. This one goes over making molds:

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media, precious-metal-clay

Focal Point…show me where to look!

Just as it does in a painting, the focal point in a wonderful piece of jewelry captures your gaze and directs your eye where to settle. Additional focal points can create a sense of movement by guiding your eye around a piece. Having a strong focal point can create a sense of dominance and unity in your piece.

Choosing your focal point first is a common way to start for many designers: you have a beautiful cabochon, a treasured charm, or a stunning glass bead. It’s not good enough just to own this treasure…you want to be able to wear it!

The greatest challenge in designing when you start with a focal point is to feature your speical item, show it off, without overwhelming it. I often start my own design work with a focal point. I am captivated by an object and it inspries me to build it a home. My Beaded Geode Pendant, shown above, is an example of following this pathway into design. The geode was beautiful and meaningful to me, but the back was ugly and the silly thing didn’t have a hole in it, so I needed to find a creative way to be able to wear it. In this case, I chose a color palette that harmonized with the geode, and a pattern for the strap that consisted of a simple repetition that wouldn’t draw attention away from the focal point.

designing, creativity, tutorials

Learning the basics of beading and jewelry making by following how-to instructions is a good way to develop a repertoire of techniques. But sooner or later, the day comes when you find yourself wondering if it would be ok to modify that pattern just a bit. As you tweak a bit here and a bit more there, you eventually end up abandoning other people’s patterns altogether. You’ve become a designer, an explorer of uncharted territory…and you are loving it!

Whether you like to work intuitively or from a carefully structured plan, there is always a magical spark at some point that starts off your creative process. Maybe you simply feel the need for a green necklace to go with a specific dress. Or maybe you have picked up an incredibly cool ammonite fossil and you must figure out a way to wear it. Perhaps there is a new stitching technique that you’ve been wanting to try, or a song lyric is stuck in your head and needs to come out in another form.

There are many different ways to enter into designing. A basic understanding of the elements and principles of design will do any artist a world of good when it comes to creating a pleasing piece, whatever the media, and over the years I have found that certain combinations of these elements and principles are of particular importance to me when I’m working on a new design. This is not an entirely logical process when I’m in the middle of actually doing it, but I’ve still been able to tease out some preferences that influence my work. Probably nobody other than you will be able to look at your piece afterwards and pick out exactly what your motivation was for designing your treasure. But they probably will be aware of the impact of your finished piece as all the elements work together to create a piece that is much more evocative than the sum of its parts.

I want to share with you the entry points that I most often use in designing my pieces. I hope that some of these concepts will be helpful to you. I really want to avoid turning a discussion on creativity into a “paint-by-numbers” kit, but am hoping instead that you will find it liberating to consider your own preferences and play with the process. Please add your own thoughts in the comments section…I’d love to know if any of my ideas ring true for you too.

We start tomorrow with focal point!

creativity, designing, tutorials

Technique Tuesday!

There are several different methods that are popular for creating woven bead necklaces: a figure-8 style of finger weaving, spiralling half-hitch macrame, and flat square-knot macrame. My preferred technique for this necklace uses all three stitches!

1. 1 Each half of the necklace is woven separately, starting at the ends and working towards the middle. For the loop, I used figure-8 finger weaving, starting in the middle of my cords, and then folded them in half and proceeded with square-knot macrame for an inch or so.
2. Once I began adding beads, I switched to half-hitches so that the work would spiral around. Beads are added only to the central cords, not to the outside working cords which are used only to do the knotting. It takes a little trial and error to figure out how many knots to add between each bead. For this necklace, I used a 8/0 seed bead to anchor each resin bead in place.
3. When each half is as long as you desire, switch back to square-knots to make sections long enough to pass through the pendant bail from opposite sides. Knot the cords to keep them from slipping back through, and add more beads to the ends of the cords to finish.

These are not terribly detailed directions, because there are so many variables that must be considered. Also, there is a wonderful book that is available to teach the finger-woven method, which I’ve mentioned before, written by Robin Atkins. My method is highly trial and error, and lots of errors went into figuring out how I wanted to make this particular necklace. The next one will be different, I’m sure! My best piece of advice is to start with a smaller piece like a bracelet, or even just a small sample that you’ll cut apart when you’re done. That way you can figure out how much cord you need based on the tension you keep in knotting and the size beads you use.

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media, tutorials

I found the blog of a group of mixed media artist who certainly are! One might even say they are crazed about charms

Charms by Deryn Mentock

Just Simply Charming is the name given to this group of 25 artists, and their blog is full of wonderfully inspiring picture, quotes, and instructions for many of the charms!!

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media, tutorials, charms

Technique Tuesday!

There are so many great shapes of resin beads available now, in so many great colors…and so fantastically lightweight!

1. 
   Slide a flat rectangle and a round resin bead onto a piece of scrap wire, and suspend it so that you can paint all sides. Using a small sea sponge, dab the beads with acrylic paints, drying between each color. Use a heat gun to speed up the process if desired. Don’t cover all of the natural bead color.
2. 
   Stamp the surface of the flat bead using a solvent ink. Heat set the design well. Flip the bead over and stamp the other side too. Heat set.
3. 
   Cut a 4 inch piece of 18 gauge color-coated wire and make a wrapped loop at one end. Slide a triangular bead, your stamped bead, and a second triangular bead onto the wire and close it with a simple loop. Cut a 1 1/2 inch piece of wire and turn a small loop at the bottom. Slide on the painted round resin bead and a triangular bead, and turn another small loop at the top. Attach the two free loops together.

Materials:
Flat rectangle bead, 25 mm in rose [Note – all rose-colored resin beads were purchased from Rings & Things]
Round bead, 10 mm in rose
Lumiere acrylic paints by Jacquard, citrine and halo pink gold
StazOn solvent ink pad in jet black
8 triangular pink beads, size 8/0 or 6/0
18 gauge color-coated wire, purple

Tools:
Piece of scrap wire
Sea sponge
Heat gun
Stamp
Wire cutters
Chain nose pliers
Round nose pliers

Copyright 2007 Cyndi Lavin. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact.

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media

Technique Tuesday!

Destiny is a bracelet that I made last year for the Fire Mountain Gems annual contest. It won second place in its category, and has been gone since…October I think?…for the company to photograph it. It finally came home a couple weeks ago. Please let me know if you see it in any of the FMG catalogs or print advertisements. Details on this year’s contest are on the FMG website.

I’ve got a tutorial on making an embroidered bracelet on my old blog. You can find the instructions here, and don’t forget about all the rest of my old tutorials that are still available!

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media

Technique Tuesday!

Blue Bells has no clasp, so make sure that you string the necklace long enough to fit comfortably over your head. I used some terrific multi-colored ribbon-style yarn to make this necklace, but feel free to experiment with the fabulous array of fibers that are available these days!

1. String 50 Czech crystals onto 28 gauge wire. I used dark blue. Leaving a 4 inch tail, crochet the wire together with multicolored flat ribbon “yarn”. Slide a crystal into place every few stitches. I crocheted a long enough length to be able to fold it into quarters. Vary this section to suit yourself. When you’ve finished crocheting, leave another 4 inch tail.
2. 
   Fold the long strand up and use the tails to wrap around and secure them together. Cut another piece of wire for the other end if needed. Twist the wire ends together so that you can hide them inside the beads in the next step.
3. 
   Cut a piece of beading wire and crimp it around one end of the crocheted strands, close to the other wires. Slip 5 or 6 clapperless Indian bells over all the wires, followed by a large-holed silver bead and more bells. Clip all the wires except for the beading wire even with the top of the large-holed bead. Thread on more beads to create the back of your necklace.
4. 
   When the necklace is the length you desire, reverse the process of burying the other wires and crimping the beading wire into place on the other side.

Materials:
Ribbon yarn
28 gauge wire
Czech crystals or other beads
Beading wire
2 crimps
2 dozen Indian bells
2 large-holed silver beads
Small beads, approximately 4 mm

Tools:
Large crochet hook
Scissors
Wire cutters
Chain nose pliers

Copyright 2007 Cyndi Lavin. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact.

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media, tutorials

Technique Tuesday!

Joy has offered a quick and easy video tutorial on making buttons from polymer clay. This is very basic information, but since I don’t do a whole lot with polymer, I learned several very clever tips from Joy!

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media, polymer-clay, buttons

Welcome to another Technique Tuesday!

1. 
   Originally, I had planned to make this a much more complicated necklace, but as I played with a few ideas, I finally realized that I really didn’t want to distract too much attention from the central medallion. So I settled on three knotted cords and a strand of ribbon yarn. I chose colors that would not only look good with the fish, but would also look vaguely like running water.
2. Cut all your fibers to at least 25 inches if you want an 18 inch necklace. I used a straw cut to various lengths in order to space the beads out properly on the cords. I used a mixture of vintage lucite and ceramic so that it wouldn’t get too heavy. Knot below and above each bead, and cut all the ends even when you’ve finished.
3. 
   Wrap the ends through and around a large jump ring so that the raw ends point downward. Pull the knots tight and glue them with jeweler’s cement for security. Attach a chain to one of the jump rings, and attach a clasp to the other end of the chain. When the cement has dried, clip the ends close.
4. 
   Finished!

Polymer clay pendants available from Amy E Fraser.

Copyright 2007 Cyndi Lavin. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact.

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media

Verydesigner has a number of really fine videos showing how basic wirework is done. No sound, so distractions…just incredibly clear filming. I recommend all of them for beginners.

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media

Getting Started with Wirework
A nice basic article with good overall information

Wonderful Wire Jewelry Projects
Lots of projects with lots of pictures to get you started by Tammy Powley. Also links to Tammy’s informative articles on types of wire.

Preston Reuther’s Wire Sculpture
Free downloadable videos from Preston Reuther, master wire sculptor. Also sells supplies, including a complete package to get started, and has a free 7-part e-course you can sign up for.

WigJig University
Supplies and instructions for making jewelry with beads and wire

Fire Mountain Gems
All types of wire, both precious and base

Rings & Things
Argentium Sterling Silver. Learn about Argentium Sterling Silver at The Artful Crafter’s blog.

Rio Grande
You’ll need to set up an account to browse the site

Creative Wire Jewelry Forum
A place to hang out, talk, and learn about…what else?…wire!

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media