About a month ago I suddenly decided that with two shows this season, it was time to get some professional photography done on my jewellery. It came together extremely quickly, with my friend Jayme Burns agreeing to take the photos, which I’m lucky she had a slot open; and my husband’s lovely co-worker Sarah-jane agreeing to model for me – and despite never having done such a thing before, she was amazing.
One of the reasons I wanted to do this was the new work I’d just started figuring out.
Copper, which is so warm and calling to me lately, with some filigree.
Someone basically stopped me on the street recently to say that my large pieces need to be shown ON MY NECK because she’d never have bought it on her own but seeing it on me showed how it could look. That’s really what prompted this whole thing, because well, my neck isn’t so photogenic:
And my camera phone clearly wasn’t cutting it:
But something needed to be done because I honestly think this is the best I’ve ever been. I am loving this line and I’m excited to find the time to get more of it done. I think it deserves to be showcased. So I got together my team. Getting the timing together was fast and furious but a few days later, I was frantically gathering some stock I wanted to try and capture.
I picked up the lovely Sarah-jane and met Jayme at my house. We started figuring out which outfits might go with which pieces.
In no time Jayme had our living room completely transformed into a photo studio and they got to work.
We even went outside in the yard for a bit!
Which resulted in some super great lookbook-like shots, like this one:
Jayme even took a couple of adorable “boudoir” pics of our kittehs!
(All together now: Awwwwwwwww.)
We worked until the light failed and then the amazing Jayme managed to get the pics edited and returned to me the very next day! With the shows coming up it was a race against the post office to get the marketing collateral I wanted printed and shipped. What I really wanted was a banner for behind my table. So I think I probably designed a jillion of them and I reached out into my super supportive crafty community with some ideas and got feedback to help me figure out where I was going with this.
It’s weird that I literally spend my week critiquing my students’ designs but I couldn’t narrow down one of my own.
I was torn and a little burnt out on design so I gave it a rest, and the next day finally came up with something that I’m sure still has flaws but by gum it was workable and printable! So off it went to the printers.
Isn’t that stunning? While I was at it, I made up some Moo cards with all the great images I couldn’t get on the main banner! I picked a fun purple back and a pile of fronts that make me smile. I see now that I should have done more work cleaning up the images to make them more consistent but I was getting really sleepy ;)
The banner came and it was all I could want. So I popped it up at my show last weekend, and lookit how great! I made a lot of other changes to my display as well – I’m looking for a more cohesive grey background – and except for the mishmash of mixmatched busts in the centre, I’m pretty pleased with both the simple look and the simple setup and teardown.
It was an amazing process for an astounding result. Thanks to Jayme and Sarah-jane for helping me pull this all together into just what I wanted!!! I feel like my work is now being shown at a level of sophistication which matches the changes that have been happening in my work lately. It feels good.
Your jewelry is beautiful, original and you definetly have the whole process together. I am not there yet, but hopefully will be one day soon!