March Blog Carnival: Who has influenced your jewelry work?

I'm pretty new to the jewelry making scene, only been doing this for abaout 2 1/2 years now. Some of you may be thinking it's a pretty decent amount of time, but really I've just been learning and teaching myself how to do all of this. I figure when I've learned "enough," I can start working on my "magnum opus." As I consider myself a lifelong learner, and since the bar in jewelry design just keeps rising, there may never an opus piece, but I can look forward to all the places this journey will take me, with all the designs in-between.

I have to say that although I have been influenced by many artists using many techniques, and by my environment and people themselves, I immediately knew who my main and lasting influence has been so far - Holly of Bijoux d'Odalisque.  It's probably because I have a thing with glamor, glitz, bling, scrumptious color and fine workmanship. It fits right in with my love of Swarovski crystals, but she takes it a several notches higher. Her work has the ultimate "put together" look.  I'm talking design and composition, color palette and execution. Her real passion is painting, as you will read about in her etsy profile. To see her jewelery, I can only imagine what her paintings are like - a symphony of color, I'm sure. I think one really needs to have a innate ability or "an eye for it" to achieve what she does. 

Although I did make a pair of earrings based on one of her designs and gave them to my older sister as a gift, the influence is really towards quality of work, color pairing just from viewing her work, and lessons in what glamorous, modern decadence is.


Isabeau Earrings by Holly at Bijoux d'Odalisque
(photograph used with permission)

 

Although there is no comparison to the juicy rubies
and vermeil findings of the Isabeau Earrings by
Holly pictured above, my sister really loved
these earrings I made for her in 2009!
(remade with matching wire, not pictured)


The Isabeau Earrings are one of Holly's most basic designs, and one her most beautiful, elegant in their simplicity. Want to see the matching pendant necklace? It's divine...

Holly is also known for her clusters of itty bitty gemstones to form a cascade of color.  A very good example can be seen in her Gilded Butterflies necklace. Those types of designs were influential to me as well. One day my older sister asked me to make a pair of pearl earrings to match a multi-colored pearl bracelet she had, and I thought of the clusters. They look nothing alike, but it was the idea I got from seeing them. The end result:


Pearl Drop Cluster Earrings. Made to match the bracelet below -
Using fine silver ball head pins made by Holly!
(September 2010)



The Pearl Drop Cluster earrings were made to match this
bracelet that my sister had for years. Impossible to match the
colors perfectly, but the earrings turned out well.

Everyone is influenced by something in their work. Whether it be from nature, a story, a song, a cause, colors, people, or just anything from their surroundings, people are influenced. This month's Starving Artists Blog Carnival was to talk about who has influenced our jewelry work. Some will paint a journey over time of who and what has influenced them and at what stage in their work they were at to produce "X," but as I said I haven't been doing this for decades yet, and so what I've been doing is flitting from technique to technique in order to learn a wide variety of things. I haven't settled on any one thing for any real length of time, and I have lots of techniques and methods still on my list to explore, but I have come back to beadweaving more than once after getting distracted by something else. That could be a sign...

To participate in the Carnival Blog, click the other Starving Artists Team members' links to blogs about their influences:

Bead Sophisticate

Island Girl

BeadSire

The FamiLee Jewels

Thanks for visiting me today and thank you Holly for your inspiration!