Resin Jewellery

So I'm having a little holiday from toymaking at the moment. It's getting incresingly harder to find shops willing to take on stock from someone who isn't represented, or a name. I've been aware for awhile that I need to make the move to do more self promotion, like...make a website or something! But it just hasn't happened yet.

For those not in the know, I've been on stress leave for a month or two this year. I'm a senior school art teacher and burnout has well and truly kicked my butt. Making is a pretty important part of my existence, the kick of generating ideas and struggling to see them made 3-D is my drug of choice. But all this icky schmoozin, networking, self promotey bollocks leaves me cold. Even though I know every indiustry in the world thrives on it. And that it's virtually impossible to get your stuff seen if you don't. And you may as well just lock yourself in a box with your little fabric effigies and beat yourself with a stick if you don't bother. Did I ever mention I'm kinda stubborn? I need to do a lot more to promote my work if I want to keep making it but ain't got the juice to do it.

So how do I solve this dilemma? By playing around with something new! I've always loved resin jewellery since the early 90s Dinosaur Designs explosion. Even though I did many years of sculpture at art school, we never did cover resins, probably as they're a bit dangerous and whiffy and y'know, bad to breathe in

This is Dinosaur Designs latest stuff, not mine!

So in the spirit of getting back to the fun stuff in making, I've had a stab at making resin jewellery.

It's nice to get back to I guess what I was trained to do, modelling. I actually started making soft sculpture as a reaction against modelling (by this I mean taking a substance and shaping it into a sculpture as apposed to the construction method: welding, wood, carving etc). Modelling was always something I found relatively easy and sewing was a whole new challenge: how to get forms by constructing fabric into shapes.

So it's been a long time since I've squished some plasticene into shape! Jewellery poses an obvious challenge in that everything is so tiny. One of my lecturers used to talk disdainfully about making sculpture with dentist tools: in other words, tiny little tools which you wield with the kind of care toy prototypers do. This obviously didn't fit in with his idea of the heroism of large scale sculpture!

The colour of resin is just amazing. the transparent stuff just seems to suck in light. I pulled a bunch of kelly green pieces from moulds the other day and they just flared with radiant light as I got them out. I'm casting ridiculous amounts of resin right now, just to try out all the different colour combos I can make! Anyway, tutorial following this post...