Page and I have a long history of giving our pieces, especially necklaces, nicknames not suitable for consumer use: ‘the tick’; ‘the spider’; now we have ‘the squid’ (Its official name is Polychrome Sea Creature or something unthreatening like that. Since this one is going to stay in my personal collection until someone offers me a lot of money for it, I figure it's okay to let the cat—or squid—out of the bag.)
I've been saving some of the dichro focals I particularly liked; this smaller one was my favorite of the series I made during late 2003/early 2004. I was especially pleased by the way the garnet multistrand piece I'd made for Page in late 2004, and decided to string this dichro up in the same format, but with a greater chromatic range.
Check out the largest version of the image for fun little things like artist textured sterling 8mm rounds. Artist-made lampwork (soft glass), austrian crystal, czech fire-polish, glass seed beads, semi-precious stones including malachite, garnet and amethyst; Chinese cloisonne; Indian, Bali and US made silver; strung on beadalon.
It took months to finish, primarily because, as has often been the case lately, my fondness for putting in just a little bit bigger beads (to allow for this really cool, pretty bead) clashed with the flowing lines I obtained in the garnet piece, which largely resulted from the fact that nothing in the body of the piece was greater than 8mm in width. Though I still prefer the flowing lines of the older piece, I am very happy with its palette (note its similarity to the tourmaline series and also its tassel shape, which is thicker at the top and tapers to a point, like a sea creature.
But of course, when I photographed it, I got hot spots on the dichro. Rats.
The original title of this post was raw squid, because we attempted to photograph the piece in .RAW format. It gave a wonderfully grainy arty look, but not one particularly suitable for documentation. So there the post sat for the next year or so: the original attempt was 0062; the second round of efforts were numbered 1215, despite the fact that I loved the necklace and wanted to show it off. Now, roughly 12 months and 1800 images later, I finally feel I have something useful, despite the fact that the necklace is not particularly nicely composed, and the background is full of crumbs and crap: this image, like a lot of the ones I've been taking lately is made with a copystand, a diffuser to one side, and mirrors to bounce the light on the other. Not perfect, but quick and easy.
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
