Shealynn's Faerie Shoppe

New Website & Where To Follow

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 03:14:00 +0000

It's been a few years since I updated this blog.

I've moved my online presence to my website: shaylynn.com (shaylynnann.com will also get you there!). This will also be the home of any new blog posts.

These days, I mostly post on Instagram. You can find me at:

@shaylynn.ann (general updates)
@shaylynnadventures (grad school, illustration, painting and travel updates)
@wonderment.arts (business)

I still occasionally post on Pinterest (my username changed to Wonderment Arts) and YouTube.

My Etsy shop, Shealynn's Faerie Shoppe, has been on vacation for a while and I will be officially closing it in the near future. While I've loved creating handmade fairytale jewelry, I'm ready for a new chapter. I have changed my commission and freelance focus to fine art, graphic design, and illustration. Keep an eye on Instagram and my website for future business updates.

Creating this blog was so formative as a teenager and young adult. I am grateful to the old "blogosphere" for the support and community as I grew as an artist!

Elven Moonstone Pendants

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 23:05:00 +0000

I love working in silver, but I have to admit that sometimes the process of sawing little strips of metal, sanding every edge, soldering (and failing to get a clean solder, and soldering again), and the rest of the process is not as intuitive to me as I would like.

On a whim, I spent some of my graduation money on a product called PMC3, or silver clay. This is silver particulate (mostly recycled from the electronics industry!) suspended in polymers, and it truly acts like clay! It's fast drying, but you can reconstitute it with water, and you can create a slip paste using leftover clay and essential oils.

I love working in 3D with clay; I can touch and feel each surface, smoothing and shaping and adding and cutting until every little curve is just right. (I've used clay sculpture for two of my favorite recent illustrations: Slam Poetry Shakespeare and Mary Anning). Honestly I didn't think this sort of process was possible for jewelry!

Silver clay is now my new favorite thing-- and I am finally, finally able to make the style of jewelry I've always wanted to experiment with more. Tendrils of vines, miniature flowers, tinier leaves, and little gemstones set deep in the silver... All heavily inspired by the Elves in Lord of the Rings, of course, and by art nouveau jewelry!

Enchanting Moonstone Elven Leaf Necklace

These are the first three necklaces I've made (well, successful ones that didn't burn up in the kiln-- my dad found an old one on ebay and fixed it up for me, but we're having difficulties holding an accurate temperature for more than an hour).

Blue Moonstone Vine Teardrop Necklace

The gemstones in these necklaces are all true moonstone-- it's a beautiful quartz-like white, but when the light hits it, it shimmers with flashes of blue, purple, and sometimes even green and gold.

Elven Moonstone Necklace

I have to work under a magnifying glass to see all the detail, and many of the pieces were made with the tip of an Xacto knife and sewing needles!

I recently purchased some silver clay to combine three things I love: sculpting, jewelry, and tiny miniature things. It hasn’t been a disappointment! I spent every hour of my spare time fiddling with bits of clay under a magnifying glass, making flower garden rings, Elven pendants, and silver leaves. The clay gets fired for two hours at 1650 degrees and turns out solid fine silver. ❤️ I just used up the last of the clay today and really want to buy more to keep playing—but it’s really expensive and I don’t know how well these pieces will do yet. Self control… self control… 😩 (I’ve been sharing my progress with with this technique on my Instagram stories, so give those a follow if you want to see more! Especially if you like to see things on FIRE 🙃) #silverclay #pmc3 #behindthescenes #wip #ontheworkbench

A post shared by Shaylynn Ann (@shealynnsfaerie) on Mar 29, 2018 at 9:19pm PDT

Once the design is finished, I fire the pendants at 1650 degrees Farenheit for 2 hours. This drives out the polymers and the final piece is fine (99.9%) silver!

This video is from my Instagram stories; give me a follow @shealynnsfaerie because I post this sort of thing a lot!

All that remains is polishing with my dremel tool, files, and micro-sandpapers. I also gave all three of these pendants a rich patina, darkening the crevices to make the designs stand out.

As I was adding the final polish to these necklaces, I couldn't help thinking of the old rhyme "Lavender's Blue." The shimmer of the moonstone is so serene and calm-- like the rhyme, which is my special lullaby to my littlest sister.

Lavender's blue, dilly dilly, lavender's green,
When I am king, dilly dilly, you shall be queen:
Who told you so, dilly dilly, who told you so?
'Twas mine own heart, dilly dilly, that told me so.

(The new Cinderella movie has a lovely version of this in the credits-- here's a link to the song!).

Moonstone is one of the few true gemstones that you can set into the silver clay and fire in the kiln. The clay shrinks around 20% and I misjudged the shrinkage, so I had some cracking in a couple of the stones as they were put under both high temperature and high stress. I've learned my lesson now, and when I make more necklace I'll be able to give the stones more breathing space. I may also be able to create bezels to set other stones which can't stand high temperatures. I have some beautiful lapis lazuli and an Ethiopian opal in my gem box....

Additional moonstone beads and pearlescent Swavroski beads on a slender, delicate, and STURDY fine silver chain

I took a ridiculous amount of photos for my Etsy listings, so I'm just going to share them all!

The backs of all these pendants have holes to allow more light to scatter throughout the gemstone

I've used up all the silver clay I had. My final projects were a series of three rose rings. I can't wait to purchase some more, but it will have to wait a bit. Fine silver is expensive, and each piece took several hours, and I don't know yet if these necklaces will sell since they are above the price point for many things in my shop. I hope that I can justify purchasing more clay and making more pieces like this-- that, or I'll just spend my personal money on it again because I LOVE this technique SO MUCH.

Giveaway Winner!

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 19:33:00 +0000

Hello Tolkienites!

It's been wonderful to get to know you (and your love of LotR) in the comments for the giveaway post!

Thank you for your patience-- I'm announcing the winner a couple days late due to unexpected travel and projects that couldn't wait. (This is also why I have five blog post drafts that aren't ready to post yet).

The entries closed on Friday, and today I get the honor of announcing the winner:

Gabrielle Holland

And her winning entry, randomly generated by Rafflecopter? Entry #20, to leave a comment on the blog post about your experiences with Lord of the Rings.

"Ive....never actually seen the movies before, or read the books, but i'd like to enter it for a gift for a friend that means the world to me and loves the series so much, she would be so happy to get this"

Gabrielle, it's wonderful that you're thinking about your friend and I hope that she loves this bracelet! If you ever want to try Lord of the Rings (movies or books-- the books are better but the movies are still good and less of a commitment!) I hope that you can share the experience with your friend! They're really, really good :)

You provided your email so I will send along an email-- and I can ship this directly to your friend with a gift card note if you'd like.

I do have more giveaway items for the future-- more handcrafted jewels in my personal hoard which haven't seen the light of day in some time-- but since I'm in a particularly busy period this month I will not announce the next giveaway for another week or two.

So keep an eye out for an upcoming giveaway, and in the meantime if you'd like to look at more of my jewelry and silks (all inspired in a roundabout way by my lifelong love of LotR!), I am running a sale on my Etsy site. There's free shipping on purchases over $35, several heavily, discounted items I'm clearing out of inventory, and a little promo code for blog readers this week: 10% off any non-customized item with promo TOLKIENFAN.

-------

(This is a temporary post that I'll keep up for a couple of weeks; I'm also announcing the winner on the giveaway post page!)

Also-- it's really funny that I somehow attracted a bunch of people to this giveaway who seem completely and utterly disinterested in Lord of the Rings. I do extend a very warm welcome to all of you-- but I'm a little confused! :)

Lord of the Rings Elvish Bracelet Giveaway

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 18:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: The entries closed on Friday, and today I get the honor of announcing the winner: Gabrielle Holland. I've sent you an email-- congratulations!

During the last two years of college, I would occasionally pull out my jewelry-making supplies and just tinker for a while-- a habit resulting in a bunch of lovely jewelry that never really saw the light of day. Making jewelry, you see, is calming and stress-relieving, but styling and photographing and uploading to my shop is this thing called work. Sixteen hour days full of classes and homework and freelancing and all the rest really just doesn't endear one to taking on extra work.

I've spent the last week doing inventory management-- you'll see dozens of new pieces up on my Etsy shop -- and I also found my old box of personal jewelry.

These are some specific fandom pieces that I made for myself, and which I don't wear as often any more. I put a lot of love and care into making them and hate to see them languishing in boxes!

So I've decided to do some giveaways :) This first one is for a Lord of the Rings etched copper cuff, featuring the first two lines of "The Song of Aragorn."

"All that is gold does not glitter"

The front of the bracelet says, in Elvish writing, "All that is gold does not glitter."

(For Tolkien nerds like me out there, technically this is phonetic Tengwar script in the English mode).

"Not all those who wander are lost"

The back is the second verse, in English: "Not all those who wander are lost."

Completely handcrafted

The piece is made from a sheet of copper, which I sawed down to size. Then I drew the Elvish script and English verse on with a resist marker and etched the copper in a chemical bath (a mid of muriatic acid and peroxide) for several hours. Once the etch was deep enough, I neutralized and cleaned the copper, gave it a patina (the dark brown), polished the writing to a bright copper shine, and sealed the entire piece in jeweler's resin.

Since it is coated in resin, the copper will not turn your skin green!

The chain is adjustable, so it should be able to fit any size wrist. If you are the giveaway winner, let me know if your bracelet size is generally a small, average, or large, and I can add or remove links accordingly.

The bronze chain is attached with maroon jumprings (which I coil and cut myself)

Giveaway Details:

Use the Rafflecopter form below to enter.

The basic way of entering is to simply leave a comment on this post-- I don't want to force people to follow me all over social media just in order to enter the giveaway. Please leave a comment on this post telling me a story about how Lord of the Rings has affected your life (or just who your favorite character is!). Or, leave a comment letting me know what your favorite item from my shop is, or your favorite one of my fairytale illustrations. Just leaving a comment gives you 1 entry!

Then if you want more chances of winning the giveaway, go crazy with following my work all over social media. Instagram (my main platform), YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Etsy, etc. If you are the winner I will do a quick double check that all your entries are valid.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

For this giveaway, I am willing to ship internationally.

And since this is a thing I see quite often on giveaways, even though this specific bracelet isn't an item I sell, I'd say that this sort of bracelet is around a $50 value.

Please note that this bracelet has been worn before (by me) but that I have thoroughly cleaned it.

Here you can see the bracelet I'm giving away, next to my handpainted LOTR silk scarf and Sting, the Hobbit sword-- and if you like LOTR prop replicas check out this old post!

I'm excited to see this bracelet off to a new home! :) But I'm also excited to see some of your stories about Lord of the Rings below.

I'm finally re-reading the books myself (I'm on the Two Towers now) and the story has changed so much for me since freshman year of high school when I last read through all of them. I think I first read LotR when I was ten, because if I wanted to watch a PG-13 movie before turning 13, my parents had a rule that I had to read the books first. Back then, I only followed the basic plotline but fell head-over-heels in love with the movies. I wanted to be Arwen for Halloween when I was 13, and my mom taught me to sew so that I could have a dress. I didn't have any money to spend on Elvish headpieces and jewelry, though, but my parents bought me pliers, floral wire, and plastic pearls at Walmart. And that is the story of how I started making jewelry-- a journey which eventually turned into my little shop which helped me pay for school! I then poured over the books (and the Silmarillion, Lost Tales, etc) again and again.

Now that I'm reading the books as an adult (ohmygosh I'm a grownup now) I'm taking away something completely different. I'm becoming especially appreciative of the poetry (even if it's not all that greatly acclaimed as poetry on its own-- I love the un-self-conscious joy of simple poetry) and savoring the loving descriptions of nature and mythology.

Check back in two weeks to see who's won-- and to tune in for a second giveaway!

(Adding this to a few giveaway lists such as Blog Giveaway Directory, Living Monterossi, Julie's Freebies,)

Hobbiton and Rivendell Inspired Silk Scarf

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 16:21:00 +0000

All of last semester, my wooden frame for stretching silk languished in the back of the garage, and every time I visited home, I shot it a little mournful look. Silk dyeing takes a long time, and time is not always a luxury I have! But I finally had the chance to string up the last scarf in my stash-- a lovely, ethereal chiffon.

My previous designs consisted mostly of celtic knotwork, Elvish writing, or loose constellations. For this scarf, I decided to push the illustrative aspect a little further. In the future, I'd love to create some scarves which are more like little wearable illustrations, featuring my own characters and stories. But for this first attempt at "illustrative" silk painting, I decided to stick with one of my tried and true favorites: The Lord of the Rings.

Hobbiton and Rivendell on the ends of the silk

One end of the sheer silk has a loose illustration of Hobbiton, complete with gardens and trees and other little Hobbit holes in the background. The other end features Imladris, or Rivendell. This is loosely based on one of J.R.R. Tolkien's very own illustration of the Last Homely House.

I did record the entire process of making this silk scarf, which should hopefully show how much love and slow, peaceful work goes in to these pieces. The second video has all the actual painting:

The chiffon is so light and airy; I love how it drapes

The waterfall is particularly majestic in this shot :)

The middle features the night sky, constellations, and swirls (because magic, and because why not?)

I'm not sure why, but the styling on this photo felt particularly Elven

If you like this, you can see some of the other scarves I've made, all modeled by my dear friend, on previous blog posts here.

"Elven Elegance" one of my previous silk scarf paintings (and one I wish I still had for myself! I'll have to make more.)

I'm very fond of celtic knotwork and so of course it had to be a part of silk painting. :) "Colorful Celtic Knotwork" is about the most descriptive name possible!

I'm ordering more silks this week (bye bye bank account!) and can't wait to dive into more silk paintings! Any suggestions for designs to work on?

Garnet and Pearl Hair Fork

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 22:23:00 +0000

Since returning from travel in mid-January, I've been putting aside a bit of time every day to rejuvenate my Etsy shop-- during school, I worked mostly on commissions and did not have the time to put in to my regular inventory. I set up a photo studio in the garage and have re-photographed a dozen pieces and finally photographed and uploaded another dozen more pieces that I had only shown at craft fairs.

And I've finally unpacked my jewelry supplies and made some new pieces!

My most recent experiment is this hair piece, featuring real garnet and a mixture of freshwater and top-quality glass pearls:

Garnet and Pearl Hair Fork, on Etsy

I recorded some of the process in the video below:

It's one of the more expensive hair forks I've made, considering that it is decorated with semiprecious gemstones and involved some of the most intensive wirewrapping work I've tackled in a while!

Just sharing some more pictures here :) Many thanks to my little sister for modelling!

Junior Year Design Dump

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 18:03:00 +0000

(This is a continuation of the "art dump" for work I made in college. You can see the post about junior year illustration here, or check the blog archive for earlier work).

Junior year was insane.

I've been gathering the images to share in this blog post will sorting and compressing all my school files on an external harddrive. It's strange to go through hundreds of files, representing hundreds of hours of work and a good deal of stress, and realize that there are only a few images per class that are remotely worth sharing.

Since my school has an unusual structure-- students take two years of foundation courses and apply for their specific programs at the end of sophomore year-- junior year had the first true classes in my program. We'd had basic training in how to use the Adobe Creative Suite, but never really applied those skills to larger projects until junior year. It was a year of scrambling to master the tools and techniques needed to execute the larger, conceptual projects. And a year of massive research. Every single project had a visual research PDF; I collected hundreds of images in just a single semester. This was also the year that we started making professional presentations of research, sketches, projects, and revisions, and went through increasingly intense three hour long critiques for every project.

As well, I finished up almost all my gen-eds during Junior year. They were a nice break from studios (for which you are in class 6 hours a week for a 3 credit class) but they made up the time in readings, essays, and exams. Junior year was a heavy, heavy workload.

In the interest of not spending forever on this blog post, the images below are not sorted by class or chronological order. Also, these are only from design classes. I've already written about the illustration class here, and another illustration one will be posted next week.

Let us begin!

This was a warm-up project for a design class-- and after a great deal of confusion about what the prompt meant, we all had fun finding numbers in the everyday world around us. Curtains, toilet paper, this weird spool of wire that the maintenance man left on the wall....

For part two, we created numbers using physical materials. I had way too much fun with this; it's the sort of design that tickles my brain.

Cut-outs from calligraphy practice scraps, salt and glue drawings, a three literally crocheted out of an old hat, wire sculpture, book sculpture (repurposed two years later for an exhibition; see the video here), embroidery on a leaf, burnt matches, an "eight" made out of ice (the mold was made with cardboard and seramwrap), my synesthetic color/personality "nine" made out of clay, and lights.

Book cover design! The first of many, and one of my favorite types of projects to do. This project was highly conceptual; we had to distill an entire book down to just a couple of adjectives and illustrate that using physical materials.

If you look at the book covers I've designed in classes over the years, you'll see that when I have freedom to choose the book I inevitably choose some of the weirdest books that I studied in high school (classical liberal arts are always relevant!). Here, it's Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. The story is a sort of 1800's detective novel involving conspiracies, anarchy, and philosophy. The outlined dynamite, vibrant flames, and wobbly typography all reflect the book's themes.

The red background is rough acrylic paint, the flame is chalk pastel on scanned paper cut-outs, and the fuse is a piece of scanned string. The most nightmarish part of this project was the typography. After setting the type in InDesign, I traced it by hand with markers, crumbled the paper, and scanned it back in. I'd never worked like that before, but it gave such an unusual quality to the letters and I felt that it gave the same sense of mirage-y unease that you get when watching light bend around the heat of a flame.

This menu project was for a Typography class, with the focus on typographic hierarchy. I decided to use the project as a chance to learn about preparing files for complicated booklets. Each page of the menu is offset from the others, and it required quite a lot of math and planning:

(I don't like doing things the easy way, apparently. I totally could have done the menu on a single small poster).

The end result was very satisfying. I cut and bound this prototype by hand.

We weren't provided with photos of the food, so I created illustrations for each page as needed.

These rack cards weren't for a class; I did some volunteering as a designer for the Discovery Center of Springfield. I learned a lot with this volunteer work (which turned into an internship)-- I was working with some outdated style guides hidden in the bowels of an old harddrive, had just learned how to use all the software, and was not working under a designer. Sometimes you learn by being thrown in the deep end!

Here's another project unrelated to any class: a logo and branding work for the fictional insole company, "Fitfoot." I attended a day-long entrepreneurial workshop, Innovate Springfield. We were sorted into teams and tasked with developing a complete business pitch in just a few hours, interspersed with talks from local businesspeople.

This was a great learning experience, but sometimes quite stressful under such a time crunch. I was the first designer to participate, and my teammates didn't know what to do with my skillset. I was able to help with the brainstorming, researching, and overall business plan, but had to advocate for the team to give me time to develop some design work. I made a logo, illustrations of the product, infographics about the business model, a fully branded presentation for our company, and marketing collateral for our presentation table. I think in the end I was able to show how important design can be to a fledgling business. My team was wonderful with the business pitch, and I learned so much from them.

Yay for visual puns! This was the first project in our typography class-- and man, I struggled with Adobe Illustrator. It's so funny thinking back to how difficult these now-straightforward techniques were.

This was the first infographic I ever made, and while it was a blast to work on, I was frustrated by the very specific information I had to cover. This timeline features about twelve different aspects of ocean exploration.

Also, I am now petrified about the quality of these illustrations, and the fact that I showed the Titanic in one piece!

Here's another project from the same class. There are stories about this prompt, and the information I was given and how I was expected to present it for the given demographic. I'm mostly including this piece because I still remember the absolute excitement of understanding how to make detailed vector illustrations. Every one of these illustrations was built completely from scratch.

I have to thank Grandma so much for her help with this family tree (text blurred for some privacy). She has done a lot of research on Ancestry, and I was able to get information on over seven generations on her side of the family! In the process, we discovered that I am very distantly related to a painter, the illegitimate son of European royalty, and a Native American mistress with a very sad story. Also, one of my great-great uncles, a farmer, looked exactly like Matt Damon, so that's cool.

This car dashboard redesign continues the infographic theme. Again, I was working with some very specific project parameters. I enjoy this sort of work, which requires thinking through use cases and safety. I can't get it to embed in my blog, but I did create animations showing this in use.

This is a sample page from a Typography project; we made a full booklet highlighting our program.

Just look at all those excessive hyphens! And even with all that hyphenation, I still wound up with bad rivers and widows! It kills me inside!

But I liked the colors.

I actually like this colorway so much that I got banned from it for an entire semester during my senior year. :)

For this project, we studied stationary design and created a line of collateral for a fictional business. I chose an ostentatious hipster barbershop and named it Occams' Razor, as you do.

In the ongoing saga of junior-year-Shaylynn had no idea how to use Adobe Illustrator, I present "Lazy Anansi."

Due to some miscommunication about the curriculum between professors, our class wound up all over the place with this project.

I enjoyed making the border designs and planning out the illustrations, but let's just talk about how bad these spreads are. Crazy type at a nonsense angle. Rough vector artwork that was not supposed to be rough. Inconsistent line weights.

And worst of all, feathered text boxes with small margins.

Here's another terrifying project! My very first gif. We had to trace Russian letterforms with a marker and animate a face using those Russian letterforms. The entire thing was made manually, frame by frame, in photoshop.

During junior year, I had my first experiences with web design. This was another difficult class-- my classmates and I wound up spending massive time on Codecademy in order to learn the basics of coding, and watched endless Lynda tutorials on Dreamweaver and Muse.

These are sample pages from my first "real" website-- a feature on The Pirates of Penzance, which I performed in in high school.

Fun fact: The performance was put on by the most wonderful theater group in the world, and I actually mimed in the operetta. My lack of singing ability knows no bounds!

Below are sample pages from the portfolio website I built. It's all over the place, and my new one is a thousand times better, but I still have a soft spot for that drop-down menu with rough calligraphy!

Look! You click "design" and the menu changes to calligraphy! Do you know how difficult that was to do?!

I learned enough about coding that at the end of the semester that the professor gave myself and another student, Taylor, a different finals project from the rest of the class. (No doubt this is because Taylor was the one who introduced us to Codecademy and since I sat next to her we always compared notes on HTML and CSS.)

The class above us was working on a senior design project. They created a kiosk design for the Community Blood Center, but didn't have the skillset to code the interface. Taylor and I learned the basics of Javascript and wrote the code for the kiosk in just a couple of weeks. We also advocated for some design changes to make the project more functional.

Unfortunately, the kiosk project was never installed. Taylor has mockups on her portfolio website-- go check it out!

While many of the projects I made junior year were learning opportunities and not much more, there are still a few that made the cut for my professional portfolio (with edits down the line).

The first is the Camellia project. We were randomly assigned short stories and tasked with creating magazine spreads. We made three spreads for three demographics: Sophisticated, "Hip Teen" (lovely demographic name), and Conservative. My story was Steadfastness: The Camellia.

As always, the project began with research, brainstorming, and sketches.

The first design, for the "sophisticated" demographic, was fairly successful from the start, and only required some edits on the typography. In the story, a Buddhist monk essentially cuts off his eyelid to stay awake (!) and I illustrated that part of the story without giving the plot away.

The second design, for "Hip Teens" was much more of a challenge. At the time, lettering was becoming uber-popular, and I wanted to learn how to do vector lettering since we never covered that in class. My professor gave me the go-ahead, and I dumped many hours into this (very rough) draft:

During preliminary critique, the professor rejected this approach to the piece. He then took on the role of an art director, and gave me specific instructions on what he envisioned for this spread. The final result was:

The ink lettering is supposed to reference Asian art, and the feathered red represents blood. The gore is supposed to appeal to Hip Teens. Though I did fulfill the project parameters successfully, this spread did not make the cut for my actual portfolio.

The final piece was my favorite, although stylistically it did not coordinate with "Sophisticated" or "Hip Teen."

I wanted to focus on the eponymous camellia flower itself, but couldn't find any photos that I wanted to use. This pushed me to try other media, and I landed on paper crafting!

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Very grateful for my little sister who helps out with the weird parts of my design homework! #artstudentproblems #blessed

A post shared by Shaylynn Ann (@shealynnsfaerie) on Mar 25, 2016 at 3:16pm PDT

I cut out (with help from my sister on a trip home) dozens of paper petals and glued them together. Then, I had a blast with the photography:

While I was very happy with the paper camellias and the magazine spread design, I realized that the short story required a lot of explanation when presenting my professional portfolio. This was especially a problem when I attended portfolio reviews in nearby cities, where many of our graduates live, and everyone recognized the project.

I've since repurposed the project into a spread for a bridal magazine:

I also used these photos for the CD sleeve we made to turn in our final work. We submitted our files onto a shared network using Airdrop or flashdrives. Yet we turned in a fake paper CD and a printed/glued CD sleeve for the same submission. Sometimes academia is just the best, my friends!

The final project I'm sharing in this post is the Murder Mystery Party.

This was a group project with my classmate Tess (she doesn't have a portfolio website right now, so I won't share her last name here).

For this project, we designed advertising and invitations for an exclusive VIP fundraising party for a fictional casino. The design prompt was Dada and/or Bauhaus (art movements very different from the style of art Tess and I usually worked in).

We focused on three designs highlighting the words "Murder," "Mystery," and "Party." We chose to work with Dada-inspired collages.

These posters are actually three-dimensional, designed with several layers of die-cut images layered on top of one another:

Here's the deconstruction of layers

For the actual invitation itself, we went all-out with a faux leather book. (Our fictional client has a massive budget for this project). It would arrive in a beat-up looking trunk, and the book itself would be weathered and features gold foil lettering. We were inspired by an actual old-style bound copy of Sherlock Holmes which my family owns.

The customer experiences the exploration and excitement of solving a mystery as they thumb through the die-cut pages. Each turn of the page reveals new parts of the illustrations. At the end of the book is the final invitation to the event.

This gif shows the pages in action.

And, of course, we had mockups for a social media presence. We built a little website as our presentation for the project if you would like to see a few more of the elements.

That's all for today! I've already shared the illustration work from the first semester of junior year; next week I'll share all the illustrations made in the second semester!

Graduation and Grand Plans

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 14:55:00 +0000

I'm happy to announce my graduation from Missouri State University with a dual degree in Graphic Design and Illustration, a minor in Art History, and a Summa Cum Laude through the Honors College.

December design graduates! We decorated our motarboards with our initials on the Adobe Creative Cloud icons

College was a wild and weird adventure; I struggled, grew, and learned more than can be summarized in a few pithy lines in a blog post. At many points, I had far too much on my plate; hence I rarely shared what I was up to on this blog. It has been a blast, though, and I've been up to a lot!

The last few semesters were rough in several ways, and although all through college I was blessed with a loving family, wonderful friends, awesome classmates, some support at school, and fairly good health, I am currently extremely relieved to be finished with school. I pushed hard to graduate a semester early, and am taking a "summer off in winter" to recoup and work on personal and freelance projects before moving.

This is one of my favorite photos with some of my close friends, from a different program, who graduated before me

I can't emphasize how wonderful it is to sit and read a good challenging book by the light of a Christmas tree, with no homework and no stress. And, on warmer days, to take my sketchbook and a thermos of tea out on a hike.

Just a phone photo of the gorgeous landscape I can escape to everyday at the moment :)

Now that the holiday travels are over, I'm getting started on some of those exciting projects.
If you are interested, keep an eye on:

Instagram |  @shealynnsfaerie (For sneak peeks, pretty pictures, and weird Stories of my adventures)

Etsy |   @shealynnsfaerie (Handcrafted fairytale jewelry shop, and shop for other artistic curiosities I might be selling)

Website |   www.shaylynnann.com (I just finished a new design!)

Youtube |   @shealynnsfaerie (For all video work)

Behance |   @shaylynnann (This is the backend for my portfolio, and contains some professional projects that are not in my more curated website portfolio)

Society6   |  Shealynns Faerie (A shop for purchasing prints and merchandise with my original designs on it--there's not much up yet, but that will change!)

There is also Pinterest (for fun and research), Twitter (if you want an auto-feed for updates; I don't really tweet), and, of course, this blog (with a new and more navigable design)!

As well, I will be spending most of my work hours on freelance projects which can't be shared at this stage. Stay tuned :)

As you can see, I have a lot of plans. Plans for this blog include actually blogging.

As an art student, I generated a ton of work while in school.

These are just the sketchbooks, nevermind the boxes full of loose drawings and portfolio cases of finished work and all the digital projects and prints. There are tubs of this stuff, people, and terrabytes of files. Also I'm missing at least one sketchbook in this pile. That is mildly concerning. There is another box somewhere out there to unpack...

Many artists don't like to share old work and will actively purge their websites and social media of any outdated work. I understand this urge to let people see only your best work-- but considering that I haven't gone back and deleted all the posts on this blog that I wrote as a 13 year old, I think it's clear that I'm not terribly fussed about embarrassing myself in public.

A couple of years ago, I wrote some blog posts sharing pieces from freshman and sophmore year. It's so strange to go back to those posts; I was in many ways a completely different person then. I've grown so much as an artist and as a person since those foundation courses, but it's interesting to see the development in hindsight.

Over the next several weeks, I'll be doing some similar art dumps here on the blog, sharing pieces from my later college years. They will continue to be filed under the "college art class" tag. Maybe someday in the future I will go through and delete these posts, but for now I'd like to share some of the process (and struggle, and occasional piece I am still proud of). My portfolio website can be the space for ruthless curation; this blog is the place for messy creation.

So keep an eye out for new posts and new projects in the coming weeks. For now, though, I'm bundling up for a hike and then a comfortable evening of homemade food and board games with my family.

Shop Sale, Christmas 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Sun, 19 Nov 2017 04:29:00 +0000

With Christmas coming up and a move coming for me, I'm running a big sale on my Etsy shop!

There is now a clearance section with items up to 70% off!

I am running additional sales for 10%-40% off of other select items.

Thank you to everyone for being so supportive while I finish my bachelor's degree.

The shop has helped me to pay for college, but I've had to back off the shop a little bit during these last two semesters to really focus on my education. Thank you especially to everyone who was so understanding when I had to close commissions.

The queue for custom orders will open again in January 2018!

For now, check out the sales. Some of the smaller items would make great stocking stuffers for anyone who loves fairytale jewelry, and the larger items are great gifts! I'd love to send as many of these pieces to new homes so I don't have to pack them when I move out of my college apartment.

Once I graduate, I will finally have a bit of time to dedicate to the shop again. There are over fifty (yes, FIFTY) items in my inventory right now which have been to a craft fair or two but never made it online, and you will see those go up in a shop update in mid January. And, of course, I will be creating new pieces! Keep an eye out, 2018 should be a great year!

All Saints' Day Party Book

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 17:48:00 +0000

I am happy to announce that my first children's book, The All Saints' Day Party by Jerry-Windley Daoust, is published! I absolutely loved the process of illustrating this book and hope that you enjoy it.

It is available through Gracewatch Media, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other booksellers! You can also contact your local library and request that they stock it. Pick up a copy, just in time for All Saints' Day! The book is great year-round to teach children about Catholic saints, but it's especially relevant during this part of the liturgical year.

For those who live in Springfield, Missouri, come stop by a book signing at DeSales Catholic Bookstore on October 25!

Over the past few months I've been very busy finishing the illustrations for this book, doing an internship, working, and starting my last semester of college. When things die down a bit I intend to blog about the process of illustrating this book. It was an amazing process and I learned so much.

Ozarks Maker Faire | Display

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 19:34:00 +0000

The school year is in full swing, so as usual blogging has taken a backseat to classes (and work). But I wanted to share with you all some pictures from the Ozarks Mini Maker Faire! This is the second year Springfield has held this event, and the second year I've participated as a vendor.

I don't often have the time or opportunity to participate in fairs, but it's always a blast. You get to meet so many cool visitors, and connect with other participants about their own creative projects.

This year I updated my booth with several new DIY displays (with help from my dad and his garage full of awesome power tools). My family came down to support me and helped to set up everything before exploring the fair themselves, and my little sister stayed to work the booth with me!

(All photos taken by my mom)

Here's the booth setup. The "corner stand" was designed by my dad and I, built from scratch. The two boards can stand up on three legs for indoor shows (pictured) or can attach to the legs of the canopy for outdoor shows (where they create eye-level "walls" for the booth).

When I'm not using the boards, they function as drawers in the workbench at my apartment. I keep all my smaller jewelry organized there-- necklaces and earrings are displayed on pieces of cardstock with my brand info, and put into small plastic sleeves that I use for shipping online orders. These bags are attached to the board with binder clips.

I attached the binder clips to the boards with a rivet gun.

Here's my dad and youngest brothers helping to assemble the boards.

My sister helping to set up the table. It's a banquet table with an extra "box" on top (which unbolts into four pieces of wood that easily fit into my car), covered with tablecloths. I purchased the necklace displays on the top level, but the lower displays are pieces of masonite wood cut out with the scrollsaw and painted with wall paint.

(Handpainted silk scarves in the background!)

The headpiece display is just foamcore for floral arrangements with a scarf on top.

And this last-minute chainmaille display is actually an old canvas! I just covered the (terrible) painting with solid gray.

The signs are masonite wood painted with acrylics.

I included a little photobook with pictures of some of the custom pieces I've made for weddings and costumes, since I usually don't have the biggest jewelry designs in stock.

I have some old posters discussing different techniques such as electroforming, soldering, and chainmaille. The posters are a bit outdated but I haven't had a chance to design new ones yet.

The side table had headpieces and cloaks that visitors could try on. I painted a "fairytale photobooth" people could take pictures at.

And I just had to throw in a shot of baby sis :)

Believe it or not, all the tables, chairs, displays, and boxes of inventory all fit inside my station wagon! (Station wagons are the most useful cars in the world and mine is awesome. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They get a bad rep.)

Elven Elegance and Celtic Knotwork Scarves

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Sat, 19 Nov 2016 23:06:00 +0000

The two silks I am sharing today are probably my personal favorites!

The first is Elven Elegance, dyed in shades of blues and greens. The art nouveau style white trees have flowering branches, and the tengwar script is written in shimmering gold resist.

This one is my Colorful Celtic Knotwork scarf, in my most time-intensive design. I traced the knotwork on by hand and outlined it in a mix of white resist (which leaves raw silk behind) and gold resist (which embeds into the fibers and adds iridescence), then painted the dye on with a tiny paintbrush.

Before the dye dried, I sprinkled salt crystals on top to create a speckled texture, and once the entire scarf was painted I added shadows in the over-under parts of the designs on the knotwork. This silk is made of a slightly heavier weave and hand-rolled hems which give this a little extra drape.

You can see my previous blog post about the constellation and green elven scarves here, and the blog post about making silk scarves here.

And now for the lovely pictures with my model Emily!

Elven Elegance

Elven poetry in proper Quenya in the Tengwar script, for all you awesome Tolkienites out there!

Here you can see the swirling tree roots!

(These earrings are new and not yet on my shop-- they feature lampworked beads with silver inlay made by another artisan, and real mint leaves which I cast in fine silver).

Emily is also wearing the braided celtic ring, the Eveningstar necklace, and the Elven leaf vine cuff.

And here we paired it with the freshwater pearl hair fork and a pair of fairy earrings I am uploading this week!

Colorful Celtic Knotwork Silk Scarf

I absolutely love Celtic knotwork-- it's what I always doodle during classes-- and it's a running joke with my classmates that I have to put knotwork into every project I can. Here's more proof :)

I envision this silk being worn more as a wrap than as a scarf, so you can see the full design.

Here you can see the flower spray hair clip too.

Just look at how luxuriously drapey that silk is! I was a little petrified to dye this one since it's a thicker silk.

Paired with the Alponse Mucha inspired hair fork.

Autumn nights really are the best for photoshoots. I'm so incredibly pleased with these pictures and Emily and I had a blast. I hope you've enjoyed seeing the pictures as much as we enjoyed taking them!

Constellation and Elven Silks

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 02:47:00 +0000

This week I am releasing my new line of handpainted silk scarves. These are luxuriously soft and lightweight and I put a lot of love into painting the artwork!

You can read a bit about the process in my previous blog post, but the short version is that I stretch the silk on a frame, draw the designs using resists, paint the dye on by hand and layer the colors over time, set the dyes, and then wash and iron the silks.

These are best handwashed, but if they get truly dirty, washing them in the washing machine on a delicate cycle is fine. Silks-- especially scarves-- can get wrinkly over time. Ironing them when they are slightly damp will bring out the shimmer and shine.

Prices currently range between 70 and 100 dollars, depending on the intricacy of the design (the exception is the green Elven scarf in this post, which is discounted because it was one of the first I made and was so experimental!). Blog readers can receive free shipping until January 1, 2017 by using the code FIRSTSILKS at checkout; adding jewelry to your order won't add any shipping charges to that order. These would be excellent gifts for anyone who appreciates handmade craftsmandship; these certainly aren't cheap as something you'd pick up at an ordinary store, but you literally get to wear one-of-a-kind works of art! :)

Now for the fun part!

I am very excited to share the photoshoot for the first two scarves today! Thank you so much to my lovely model Emily for going to the park and letting me poke and prod and direct. She's never modelled before; can we all agree that she's a natural?

The first silk has constellations and a mountain sunset. It is on my Etsy here.

And the second is this pale peridot Elven scarf, which you can find here.

Here you can see a detail of the mountains. Emily is also wearing the braided celtic silver ring and Enchanted Eveningstar necklace in summer green.

We had such beautiful light for our photoshoot! I'm so glad we were able to take pictures when we did; the trees were changing colors but there were still flowers in the gardens!

The Elven scarf features Elvish script, a flowering tree, elegant swirls, and several shades of peridot greens.

Tolkien fans will probably be pleased to know that the script is proper Tengwar and the writing is a poem in Quenya. The scarf's colors are inspired by the pastel banner that Arwen carried to her wedding with Aragorn.

The bracelet is also Elf-inspired-- a sparkling silver cuff with glass leaves and pearls.

And in this picture you can see another new release-- a hair fork based on Alphonse Mucha's Art Nouveau pieces!

Chic and nerdy! :)

Here you can see the white tree in better detail.

Emily also modelled some jewelry; here you can see the Entwife Pinecone Headpiece which I've made for costumes and weddings in the past. It's normally a custom order but I've finally got one in regular stock!

I hope you've enjoyed these pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them! Thank you again to Emily for modelling. Keep an eye out out later this week for pictures of the other three scarves!

Coming Soon: Handpainted Silks

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 17:57:00 +0000

Last year over Christmas break, I purchased a batch of pure silks and box of dyes. I had just finished a term paper about silk landscape painting in medieval Japan, and was intrigued by the idea of creating works of art on silk. I wanted to create special gifts for two of my closest friends-- and what is a better excuse to learn a new skill?

I've gained an extremely high level of respect for those Japanese artisans.

My dad helped me to design and build a stretcher for the silks, and I set to work learning how to paint, dye, and set the colors.

Simply adding swirls of color to the silks was fun, but actually painting pieces of art onto silk is not for the faint of heart. I ruined many pieces before reaching any level of proficiency!

This scarf was designed and painted by both a friend and me

The entire process is time-consuming (the simplest pieces take a minimum of three hours of work to create, and the longest I've spent on a scarf was ten full hours of hands-on attention, plus the extra days to set the colors!). However, the process is so unpredictable and calming that the best way I can describe it is as a sort of zen experience.

A photo posted by Shaylynn Ann (@shealynnsfaerie) on Dec 20, 2015 at 7:36pm PST

I haven't had much time to dedicate to learning this skill, as I've been busy with all the usual things (hefty class loads, even during the summer, my first large-scale freelance job, the shop, and spending time with friends and family).

This scarf was designed by my little sister, and we painted it together. She wrote a guest blog post about the experience, which you can read here.

However, during breaks I did take a few opportunities to experiement, and have created several scarves which I will be selling on my shop!

The prices will reflect the quality of the silks and dyes and the large amount of time which goes into creating these.

A photo posted by Shaylynn Ann (@shealynnsfaerie) on May 22, 2016 at 6:01pm PDT

This past weekend, when the autumn light was beautiful, a friend came to a park with me to model the scarves. I am editing the pictures throughout the evenings this week, so keep an eye on the shop! I am hoping these will be up in time for anyone who might be interested in purchasing them as Christmas gifts.

Once all the photos are edited, I will share them here on the blog. I'm really pleased with this photoshoot and I hope you enjoy it, too!

Elegant Teal and Pearl Wedding Set

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Sat, 05 Nov 2016 18:02:00 +0000

This summer, I had the honor of making jewelry for a bride and her bridal party. She is also a friend, which makes it even more amazing! :)

Each ensemble was made from Swarovski pearls, crystals, and rhinestones. The chain, wire, and clasps are all gold-filled; gold-fill is many times less expensive than gold, but is far thicker than gold-plate (and does not wear off). It has the added benefit of being sturdier than ordinary gold!

The brides's necklace is the jewel of these sets. The teal crystals are the bride's Something Blue, and also match the bridesmaid dresses. I was able to find gold bead caps to add elegant visual interest.

The bride's necklace is actually made from two separate necklaces of different lengths; after the wedding they can be separated for everyday wear.

I spent many enjoyable hours wirewrapping the bead patterns into the chain. The wirewrapping technique is the same I use for the "indestructible rosaries" and means that this necklace will last far beyond the wedding day without any risks of breaking due to snags (don't we all hate when that happens?).

The bride and bridesmaids all wore matching earrings with small pearls, rhinestones set in gold, and teal crystals.

The bridesmaid necklaces were simpler and adjusted for the height of the neckline. Here, Swarovski pearls float on ultra-thin strands of fiagro gold chain. They are made with the same sturdy wirewrapping technique.

When I was taking pictures before packing these pieces up, I set the bridesmaid necklaces on my necklace stand while photographing the earrings. I thought the layered effect looks rather nice!

Of course each bridesmaid necklace has the matching earrings.

I had a little bit of chain left over and made a surprise minimalist bracelet for the bride.

Just a detail of the gold chain.

Look at how the crystals catch the light! :)

Moonstone and Opal Ring

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Sat, 05 Nov 2016 17:26:00 +0000

This commissioned ring is handcrafted from fine silver and highlights a stunning moonstone and two opals.

We had a bit of a challenge finding the right stones. Quality moonstones can be difficult to find; many are cloudy and not well cut. I was able to source a beautiful rainbow moonstone cut and faceted by a lapidarist (in my own state, in fact-- hooray for local businesses!).

Moonstones and opals and silver oh my. ✨✨✨ #workinprogress #jewelersbench

A photo posted by Shaylynn Ann (@shealynnsfaerie) on Jul 5, 2016 at 8:27pm PDT

The Australian opals are tiny-- just look at the size compared to my tweezers! I've never worked with something so delicate before, and I have to admit that I dropped one and spent a solid fifteen minutes looking all over the floor for it.

The band is made from extremely thin strands of fine silver which were braided, reinforced with a strand of half-round silver, and soldered to size. This actually took two tries; ring sizing is no easy task!

The bezel setting for the moonstone has a cutout in the back, which allows it to catch the light.

When worn, the ring turns a little pink as the light reflects off the skin. When held up to the light, it flashes with some brilliant hints of blues, purples, and whites. The opals, of course, sparkle with a full rainbow of colors.

The metalwork is purposefully rustic and finished with some sanded patina to add depth of color. Here you can see the ring on my pinky; it's tiny!

This engagement ring was probably the most challenging piece I've worked on, and I'm excited to experiment with these techniques more!

The Mermaid and the Unicorn { Book Review }

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Mon, 15 Aug 2016 21:11:00 +0000

Daphne Woodhouse jumps at the chance to join her college’s study abroad program at a Parisian convent. Although thrilled to immerse herself in French Art and History, she soon finds herself drawn into a hidden world of myths and legends come to life. There’s a mysterious nun guarding the convent’s secret garden, a glamorous nightclub owner soliciting Daphne’s musical skills, something sinister stalking her in the shadows… and of course, the handsome and chivalrous Derek Moon, who is determined to win Daphne’s heart. When the fate of a magical species is laid in Daphne’s hands, she must make a choice that will change her future forever.

The Mermaid and the Unicorn is Elizabeth Hajek's debut novel, and the first book in the Song of the Fay series.

I've known Elizabeth online for many years; she was the administrator of a forum for fans of Regina Doman's novels and we art both part of an intensely creative community which still keeps in touch. In high school, we were able to meet at a conference (where she premiered her film of Doman's book!) and she was just as wonderful in person and online. She encouraged younger forum members like me in our various pursuits, oversaw many collaborative stories, and was the first editor of the magazine Ink and Fairydust which introduced me to graphic design and comic writing. She owns an absolutely amazing costume business and runs two blogs, Elenatintil and Confessionsof a Seamstress. Lately she's been dealing with some serious health issues and her blog posts have opened my eyes to the struggles of chronic illnesses. All in all, Elizabeth is a serious role model.

But enough biography; The Mermaid and the Unicorn deserves to be judged on its own merit.

For those who dislike even the smallest of spoilers, I'll say that I almost pulled an all-nighter reading The Mermaid and the Unicorn. I simply couldn't put it down! It is unique and well-written, full of mermaids, unicorns, intrigue, romance, and all the charms of Paris.

Today is the worldwide release! The book is available in paperback and e-book (the paperback version comes with a free ebook!). It is also available for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. Please visit GeekHaus Press and Elizabeth Hajek's blog for more information.

____

What if the medieval tales about fairies, elves, dragons and other magical creatures were real? What if they weren't allegories, metaphors, or mere myths, but part of a reality tangent to our own?

This is the question which Hajek explores in her novel, and to me, one of the most intriguing parts of the book. The Mermaid and the Unicorn takes place in modern Paris, but the world is the one of medieval legends where nuns and mermaids can exist together.

I’ve never been to Paris, but everything I know about it is absolutely magical. But the Paris of The Mermaid and the Unicorn is even more magical; cryptic encounters, hidden fairies, and graceful unicorns fill crevices of the city. A mysterious woman, Amelia, gives Daphne Woodhouse an invitation which draws her into a darker part of the city and leads her into an epic adventure. And what an adventure it is—it’s such a treat to read a story which is such rollicking good fun.

I especially loved learning about the fierce, fiery mermaids. These are not the creatures of Disney’s Little Mermaid; they bear much more of a resemblance to sirens or Hans Christian Anderson’s original tale.

You wouldn’t expect Daphne Woodhouse, a self-admittedly naïve, bookish girl to be the heroine of a thrilling adventure, but there is a lot about this book which is unexpected!

At first, the confluence of both Christianity and a magical realm caught me off guard, but Hajeck masterfully weaves the two together. Catholicism is so full of symbolism, and the Church was so important to the myths and legends which influenced the book that, somehow, it works, and works well. (In fact, it reminds me a little bit of the way C.S. Lewis approached his Space Trilogy!)

Hajek herself is not Catholic, and I honestly think that this adds extra depth to the story. She clearly has done tremendous research on Catholic history and devotions and is very respectful of the characters’ faith. But since she is a Protestant, aspects of Catholic devotion and culture must be foreign to her. Perhaps because of this, she manages to make Christianity as exciting and novel as the magical creatures—which is great, because the beginning of the book shows how the characters have deep faith and very real struggles, and I was afraid that this might take a backseat once unicorns and mermaids arrived onstage!

The Mermaid and the Unicorn gave me a little culture shock—and this despite the fact that I am a homeschooled Catholic myself! Daphne Woodhouse comes from a type of very conservative homeschool family which I rarely see represented well. I’ve seen authors use characters like Daphne either as a preaching platform or as the comically old-fashioned brunt of jokes. Hajek, however, presents Daphne just as she is: unapologetically Daphne. This goes for Daphne’s personality, too. How often do you see a reserved, bookish woman as the strong heroine of an adventure story?

Daphne’s college friends take her background right into their stride, and each of them is equally unique in their own way. They are an interesting bunch who discuss Joan of Arc and old hymns in the middle of ordinary conversation. (And their university, which sends students to spend a semester in a French convent with nuns full of personality, sounds nerdy and wonderful). But, again, Hajek gave each character a great personality and simply presents them as they are. (A couple characters don’t have as much complexity as I would like, but I strongly suspect we’ll be learning more about them in later books. Looking at you, Derek Moon. And you, spunky Scottish Katie.)

This is exactly why I will recommend The Mermaid and the Unicorn to Catholics, Protestants, and non-Christian lovers of fantasy novels alike. Those unfamiliar with traditional Catholic culture can simply be immersed into a different way of life (with a dash of fairytale magic and a good helping of Paris charm, of course).

There are a few paragraphs here and there which were overly expository, few characters I wanted to learn more about (DEREK MOON!), and a couple unanswered questions about the magical part of the world, but Hajek’s writing is absolutely compelling. As a college student, I find it really difficult to get drawn into novels the same way I did as a child—I’m so much more critical about what I read, and I’m so often too mentally exhausted to tackle tough books. The Mermaid and the Unicorn overcame both these problems, and I may or may not have pulled an all-nighter…

After all, who can resist a story which incorporates medieval art history, selfless unicorns, Parisian nightlife, bookworms, fierce mermaids, goofy friends, intense adventure, taekwando, courage, sacrifice, faith, love and magic? Every page of it is full of Beauty.

At the risk of getting into Really Bad Spoiler territory, I’ll say that there is one other aspect of the book which I really appreciated. One of the characters makes a surprising decision which few fictional characters struggle with, and in keeping with the rest of her book, Hajek presents the decision with the respect it deserves.

____

The Mermaid and the Unicorn is an enchanting book which I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys a good fantasy novel. This is perfect for the 16+ crowd (although younger teens may also enjoy it; it depends on their maturity!) I can’t wait for the next installment in the Songs of the Fay series!

____

Available for $13.99 in paperback (comes with a free Kindle version), $2.99 for Kindle, and free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

I did receive an advanced reader copy of the book to review-- the final version has been proofread and edited a bit since I read it.

Celtic Knotwork Tutorial | Marker Method

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 20:27:00 +0000

A few years ago, I filmed myself drawing some celtic knots for my YouTube channel (back in the day when I was trying to vlog regularly). Since then I've had a small but constant stream of people asking me to make an actual tutorial.

I'm still very much learning myself, but after several years of being ridiculously obsessed with celtic knotwork and other ornamental patterns, I think I've got a grip on the very basic techniques.

In trying to teach my little sister I realized that some of the techniques I used could be simplified by drawing basic celtic knots (rectangularly-based) with thick markers.

And so I took a break from regular work to tackle a little break-neck-speed tutorial video. Hopefully the video is better quality than what you've seen on my channel before; this tutorial was really an excuse to try out new recording equipment and learn new editing softwares for other projects in the future.:)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy! Here's Part 1:

Part Two deals more with the walls, which split the celtic knots up and make the really cool, interesting designs. It shows how primary grid walls always bounce the bands, whereas secondary grid walls sometimes create interesting lines and loops.

I really recommend that you sit down and try to copy the knots in the videos; the concepts usually don't "click" until you experiment on your own!

Elvish Jewelry

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Sat, 09 Jul 2016 19:47:00 +0000

I wanted to share some pictures of Elvish jewelry I've made in the last year! (These aren't up on my Etsy shop; a majority of these were personal projects or for gifts).

It should by now be pretty obvious that I absolutely love The Lord of the Rings and that the aesthetics of both the books and the movies (and illustrations by geniuses such as Alan Lee) are hugely influential. Also, as a typography and sort-of literary nerd, I am in love with the beauty of the Elvish alphabet which Tolkien developed.

All that is gold does not glitter,Not all those who wander are lost;The old that is strong does not wither,Deep roots are not reached by the frost.From the ashes a fire shall be woken,A light from the shadows shall spring;Renewed shall be blade that was broken,The crownless again shall be king.

I haven't yet perfected the process of making these etched cuffs; the process is long and convoluted and so far has approximately a 50% success rate on a piece which can take up to two hours of hands-on work per bracelet, when making them in batches.

It begins with a sheet of raw copper, which I cut on the bandsaw and both drill and preliminary sand with the drill press. Then I file and sand each cuff by hand to remove any metal burrs or roughness, and attack it with steel wool while wearing plastic gloves to remove any grime or fingerprints.

I then write the Elvish and English quotes on the copper with a wet Sharpie. After the resist had dried, it's time to suspend the cuff in an etching solution of hydrochloric acid and peroxide. Over the next several hours, I occasionally stir the acid to assist the etching process.

If the etch is crisp and deep enough, I remove the copper while wearing protective gear, neutralize the acid, scrub the piece with steel wool, rinse it, and submerge it in a Liver of Sulfur solution. The LOS oxidizes the copper, turning it a rich brown or black. Once the desired color is achieved, I neutralize the LOS and allow the piece to dry for fifteen minutes.

Then for the finishing touches! I gently sand the piece with three different grits of micro-sandpaper so that the words shine brightly on the oxidized background. I form the copper strip into a bracelet shape and coat all sides with a jewelry resin. The resin ensures that the piece retains the oxidized and sanded color, and also prevents the copper from turning skin green. The resin dries overnight; when its ready, I add the beads, chainmaile, chain, and clasp!

Hopefully in what remains of this summer I will be able to perfect the process and create some Elvish cuffs to stock on my Shoppe! Do you have any favorite (public domain) quotes that you would like to see in Elvish on a cuff? Please let me know in the comments!

(The cuffs will have English quotes which are transcribed into Tengwar, the Elvish script, rather than being translated into Quenya or Sindarin, the Elvish languages).

Lately I've also been working on the process for these little metal booklet necklaces! This one has the entire Aragorn poem on it. The process is similar to the creation of the Elvish cuffs, except that the words on the brass pages are stamped letter-by-letter, and I cut the jumprings myself so that the diameter of the rings on the binding is just right.

The worst thing is when I hammer in a letter too hard or hold a stamp upside-down or backwards-- and entire page of the book has to be started again from scratch!

But I'm really enjoying the process of figuring this out and will be making more little metal booklets this summer. (Currently I have Jane Austen and a G.K. Chesterton booklet necklaces available).

Another booklet experiment! This one is made entirely from copper and features the same poem. However, the verso pages feature Elvish etchings! Each capitalized word (gold, glitter, wander, lost) is featured.

But here you can see how much difficulty I am having with consistent etches. You can barely read the Elvish!

These are some shots of other Elvish cuffs with more verses from "All that is gold..."

And the bar necklace pictured above is made in the same way, and reads "The Road Goes Ever On" in both English (backside) and Elvish.

This necklace was a custom piece-- and I neglected to photograph the backside. The copper pendant has Tolkien's initials etched on it, and the back had a quote. The necklace is made from two strands of chain interspersed with wirewrapped beads.

Another one which I didn't photograph properly-- this necklace is inspired by Arwen Undomiel, the daughter of Elrond, who gives up her Elven immortality in order to marry Aragorn, a human.

In the movies, she gives Aragorn a necklace (the lovely silver Evenstar) to symbolize her gift. He protests, and she responds, "It is mine to give to whom I will, like my heart."

The necklace is paired with a full cuff (no chain and clasp) which contained the lines "I would rather spend one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone."

Also, three cheers for nerds! I get to make the best jewelry sometimes. :) This custom piece has another beautiful LotR quote: "Faithless is he who says farewell when the road darkens."

A nice dash of gold chain, green pearls, and blue stones...

...and the back of the pendant has the recipient's name etched in Gallifreyan!

I'll leave you with one last picture of yet another Elvish cuff! Hopefully this experimentation will pay off sometime. :)

Please leave quote suggestions in the comments! Thanks!

Gold Puzzle Heart Necklace

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Sun, 12 Jun 2016 07:24:00 +0000

These three necklaces are another recent commission. A mother wanted three coordinating necklaces for herself and her two (young adult) daughters!

Like the moon initial necklaces, this was another set somewhat inspired by friendship necklaces. She had requested a heart shape and the words, and let me design from there.

I decided to take the heart shape and break it up in to three puzzle pieces. In addition to the obvious symbolism, this meant that each individual necklace was an interesting shape on its own.

These are handcrafted out of gold (to be specific, gold-clad brass-- gold clad material never wears out like gold-plating does!). Even though it wasn't solid gold, the sheet of metal was expensive and I have to admit that I was very nervous while cutting into it with my jeweler's saw. Stamping it was worse. I almost stamped the "B" upside down, but thankfully caught myself! I love having an opportunity to explore higher caliber materials than I normally work with.

All three of them already had gold chains, but I sent the pendants along on basic chains anyway. Also the necklaces photograph better with chains. :) These gold is brushed, so at certain angles it is a dark rich gold, but other times it catches the light and flashes a brilliant pale yellow.

I am happy to report that these necklaces were well-received and everyone involved is the nicest ever.

Moon Phase Initial Necklaces

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Wed, 25 May 2016 01:05:00 +0000

lassy grown-up friendship necklaces? Tiny sterling silver moon phases? Yes, please! Have I mentioned before how much I love custom orders? Collaboration really does lead to some awesome things. Like moon phase initial necklaces (plus a keychain).

These are inspired by the little heart necklaces we all had when we were twelve and a half and wanted to prove that we were the best BFFs in the whole wide world. Except these are much nicer than plastic hearts.

These necklaces began life as a sheet of sterling silver. I cut each shape out with a handsaw, hammered it to create the mares (who else took astronomy?), drilled the holes, filed the edges, and cut the jump rings!

...but wait! There's more!

The initials of each of the four friends!

Round two of the moon necklaces.

Beginning Illustration

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Sun, 15 May 2016 06:21:00 +0000

very story has to begin somewhere, and my journey to (hopefully) creating professional illustrations began this past fall.

Of course, the story began long ago when I learned to read, became a voracious Book Reading Monster, and filled sketchbooks with doodles of characters (and some empty pages so that I could finish each book faster and feel very accomplished). And I have been in college studying the arts for over two years now. However, due to the organization of my program, I didn't take any specialized illustration classes until junior year. The first class (last semester, fall 2015) was called Materials and Techniques in Illustration and it certainly lived up to its name. I spent more money on supplies for this one class than I had spent on the textbooks for all of my gen-eds of the year, combined.

Each project was focused on learning a new medium; several of which I had never tried my hand at before. Our assignments were relatively straightforward, but the research, documentary PDFs, critiques, and revisions fairly well drowned us by the end of the semester.

Nevdroonia by Shaylynn Rackers. Please do not remove signature or watermark.

The month after fourth grade, I told my little brother a story.

It was summer, the day was hot, and the air was languid. My brother and I were curled up in hammock swings because Dad told us to go outside, and it was that day that we first visited Nevdroonia. That afternoon, a "Once Upon a Time" turned into a daring adventure of swordfights, royalty, pirates, fairies, and dungeonous castles with chocolate doors. The name of our magic country was Nevdroonia-- from Neverland, Droon, and Narnia-- and after a while we invited our siblings and all of our friends to join in the adventure.

Conceptually, this was by far my favorite piece. We began with a writing assignment describing a story from our childhood. Some of my classmates told humorous stories, others heartbreaking, and one drew herself having a tea party with skeletons. I described the Adventures of Nevdroonia.

(Yes, longtime readers, this is the same world that inspired my first-- and so far, only--NaNoWriMo novel in all one hundred and fifty pages of its awful preteen glory).

Figuring out how to make the cloak less "plastic"

The adventure that inspired this illustration was from the day that my brothers and I dressed in costume (I was, of course, in my trusty white cloak) and went questing to save the lost prince and princess who were trapped in a wizard's tower. As I remember, the tower only appeared if you learned the magic words. It grew out of the R--'s house inch by inch. When the mist cleared, we shouted at one another that there was a shape, an awful shape, no it can't be, IT'S A DRAGON! Ben charged at it with the battle cry of "PANCAKES," much to my chagrin. Will and I had the much more valiant cry of "For Nevdroonia!" Nick sat on the ground and ate a popsicle.

Working on the preliminary in my sketchbook

Childhood adventures turn out to be difficult to draw in a coherent way, and my professor encouraged me to take a less literal route than I had in my initial sketches.

The entire piece was created with washes of india ink on bristol board, on top of a drawing inked with a dip pen. My calligraphy G-nib doubles as the best drawing nib ever! Although I sometimes dislike how much our instructors complain about the use of technical pens like my handy Microns, I'm starting to agree that using dip pens with good nibs creates way more interesting lines.

You can't just get into Nevdroonia by walking there. We balanced precariously on the fenced verge of our neighbor's garden and flung ourselves at the tree-swing. This is why you have to be barefoot in Nevdroonia; you can't grip the swing with your toes if you are wearing shoes. At the tree roots, my brother had used a shovel and sandbucket to dig a pit (he told Mom he was studying erosion but she didn't buy it for a minute), and we swung over these Deep Cliffs Between the Worlds to land, stumbling and laughing, in our land.

____

After the inkwash project, we created portraits of famous illustrators ("your idol") using scratchboard. I would really like to blog about this, since I loved working with scratchboard so much and I long for the chance to do so again.

However, those portraits of our "idols" were assigned and mine was an illustrator whose editorial pieces portrayed women poorly or not at all and whose Playboy illustrations were, well, Playboy illustrations. Me being me, I took a stance against this illustrator's messages in my sketches. My professor wasn't happy with the sketches, and the final result was a compromise. And so, moving along...

____

Portrait as Old Master by Shaylynn Rackers

There are few mediums that make your hands as sore as good old waxy colored pencil. And yet I love it. Every inch of this thing represents a few hours of constant re-working and pushing into the paper with all the strength I had left.

The assignment was to create a self-portrait (focusing on the face) of yourself as an Old Master. After much digging, I found this gorgeous self-portrait by French Neoclassical painter Marie Gabrielle Capet.

My piece looks so much less impressive when I show you the original...

Marie Gabrielle Capet was a fascinating individual. She lived in eighteenth-century France and at age twenty-one was admitted into the Academy (the Royal Academy of Art was responsible for training the best and brightest in the Neoclassical/Rococo style, and had a monopoly on official practices). This is even more remarkable because she was a woman, and the Academy only allowed four women to study at a time! There are some reasons why I'm glad I live in the twenty-first century...

Photoshop magic. It looks so much less creepy with a shorter neck...

I spent nearly two hours working on angles and lighting to take the best reference picture. Bit ridiculous, yeah. My duct-taped tripod and I are very good friends now. Some Photoshop magic later, and I was ready for the long haul.

Did I mention that colored pencil takes a long time?

Colored pencil takes a long time. On the upside, by the time I finished I was just starting to grasp how to properly draw bunched-up silks.

#selfielikeits1783 The final redo of the masters/self-portrait mashup is finished! My artist for the mashup was Marie-Gabrielle Capet. Even though it took forever I am a greater fan of #prismacolor #coloredpencils than ever before. #illustration #classproject

A photo posted by Shaylynn Ann (@shealynnsfaerie) on Oct 9, 2015 at 10:18pm PDT

Portrait as Lumberjack by Shaylynn Rackers

Assigned prompts. You can't avoid them, and sometimes you get truly interesting results. Such as when you have to draw yourself as a lumberjack, because that is the word that you drew from the pile.

It's actually kind of awesome.

But my roommate said it looks like an axe-murderer.

It was handy that I went home the weekend I had to work on this piece, because my dad had a heyday loaning me all of his safety equipment and taking reference pictures. Most of them turned out like this:

In my defense, it was really sunny.

Some imagination later (and what I now recognize as a poorly chosen reference photo for the hatchet), I was ready to go. I really wanted to do an awesome Dr. Suess style background with an angled frame, but the professor didn't like that idea. So we compromised again, and this time it made the piece much better.

I'm not a big fan of chalk pastel. It gets in everything, makes a grinding noise on the paper, and refuses to come out of the grooves of your fingerprints.

Unfortunately the original drawing suffered some damage at my school's art gallery. I had sprayed it really well, but the completely illogical way that they display pieces in that building ensures that something will get mildly damaged. Mine was one of the unlucky ones. Thankfully, I was able to disguise the magnet dents and erase the smudges from the border, but I'm glad that I documented it before bringing it to the gallery.

Umbridge by Shaylynn Rackers

"Draw someone you hate. Ink and watercolor."

Challenge accepted.

There are few people I hate so much as Dolores Umbridge, and never mind that she's a fictional character. She's the sickly pink cream of the crop, and I'd be darned if I didn't get a chance to show her in her most evilist.

I imagine that right before taking a sip of that sugary tea, she was using her equally sugary frog voice to tell Harry to take lines. I must not tell lies.

Each half of the face is a different expression; two versions of the evil evil Umbridge smirk

My professor was a bit nonplussed about suddenly being presented with a fictional character, but approved my sketches and then pushed me to add greater value contrast (every single class). I really do need to work on this; when I use vibrant watercolors its so easy to let the hues speak for themselves and forget the grayscale "foundation."

Our final project came in two parts: a 3D illustration and an acrylic painting. We drew names out of a stack, and (after a possibly illegal trade with a classmate who had Shakespeare and wanted my Darwin) I got Shakespeare! The assignment was to create a portrait of the assigned famous person.

The Bard's Muse by Shaylynn Rackers

One of the joys (and trials) of a classical high school education was reading a lot of The Bard. I was a little excited. And my nerdy knowledge clearly overtook any sensibilities of time management. I just had to reference my favorite works. Once the sketch was there (among several far simpler sketches...) the idea just wouldn't go away.

I didn't get to relax over Thanksgiving break, since it was the week before the deadline for this final project and I was in way over my head. Sadly, Thanksgiving was also the only break of the entire semester. Even without going overkill on projects, I was pulling sixteen-plus hour workdays. Aside from the sense of accomplishment at learning so much in this class (and a couple others), last semester was really difficult.

But with Thanksgiving (and Christmas) break in the past now, I can separate these pieces from the sinking feeling of finals-induced anxiety.

The acrylic painting features eleven references; can you catch them all? And just look at my period-correct "S"s!

(I'm excited to take Painting I next year; my painting skills need some developing to allow me to create the images as I see them in the mind's eye).

Slam Poetry Shakespeare by Shaylynn Rackers

Slam Poetry Shakespeare, above, was inspired by the "Epic Rap Battles of History" (<-- language warning) and the slam poetry that has been circulating my facebook feed. We all know that Shakespeare would have been a great slam poet. I began working on the sculpture during our workshop with a visiting artist, the amazing Liz Lomax. The last time I really made art with clay was the diorama of the Last Supper for 3rd grade religion class.

The sculpture is made out of Sculpey clay, wood, fabric, 3D printed components, LED lights, lace, oils, acrylics, and more.

I will be doing an entire blog post on this piece soon. This medium is so much fun and I am very excited about the final piece. It's so different from anything I've tried recently.

The drop cap featured on this post is by designer Jessica Hische. She has made these drop caps freely available to bloggers, but I wanted to put in a shout-out because you really should check out the whole collection. I recently discovered it and am completely, utterly, head-over-heels in love with it.

Orchid Wedding Jewelry

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Mon, 09 May 2016 06:01:00 +0000

his spring, I had the honor of designing orchid-themed wedding jewelry for a bride who loves elaborate, fairytale jewelry and allowed me a great deal of creative freedom. (She was also wonderfully understanding when I was going through exams and took longer than normal to respond!)

These pieces are made with solid sterling silver, Swarovski pearls, and rhodium-plated silver flowers. I purchased the flower components individually for this design; some day in the future I'd love to create a more expensive line of fine jewelry with handcrafted silver flowers like this. How awesome would that be to work on?

For now, though, this was amazing to design. We began with a series of sketches so that I could gauge her style and how it fit with the budget.

After purchasing any supplies I didn't have on hand, I settled down for hours of work! The silver orchid necklace looks so small and delicate, and in order to make it sturdy and lasting I cut my own teeny-tiny jumprings to ensure the quality was completely up to par. The tiny pearls are wrapped on to the chain by hand.

This particular necklace was more time-consuming than expected-- two full evenings after classes-- but I enjoyed every second of it.

The first bridesmaid necklace features the same orchid-inspired flowers, but also uses my "signature" Czech glass leaf beads! This was the perfect opportunity to purchase a rare version of these beads (there are still a few left for a project or two this summer).

This design pairs the silver flowers with pastel pink Swarovski pearls and tiny lavender crystals.

Originally, the bridesmaids were going to have matching necklaces, but I created this second one on a whim with materials I had on hand. I wanted to realize another one of my sketches and offer it as an option (honestly I assumed that I would simply list it in my Etsy shop). When I showed her the picture, though, she decided to go with one of each necklace design for the bridesmaids!

This one is reversible. :)

Just a behind-the-scenes shot; as I photograph each piece I lay them on the necklace dummy to prevent tangles. When I then went to package the necklaces it was just a little bit of a struggle....

I'm honored to be chosen to design such special wedding jewelry. :) Congratulations to the new couple!

Looking Back { More Freshman and Sophomore Art }

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 17:45:00 +0000

am curled up on the recliner in my family's living room with a beautiful view of our hilly yard and our neighbor's field.. A mug of amaretto coffee is steaming next to me, and the busy sounds of my homeschooling siblings are wafting up the stairs in a comfortable chatter.

Right now I am on spring break, and for the first time since last summer, I have a few days with no plans whatsoever. There will be lots of reading, board games, hiking, visiting friends, and the bare minimum of homework and Shoppe work.

My major leaves no time for downtime. In the design program, we are in the classroom for six hours a week per three-credit-hour class. Inevitably, the entire class time is spent on critiques or rambling lectures, so after eight or so hours of classes I have to spend all night doing the actual work. Tack on the occasional necessary night class, the extra requirements for gen-eds and honors, having a social life, networking stuff, and, of course, running my Shoppe-- boredom is a luxury that I'm soaking in right now.

And so, I'd like to share some of the work I made in freshman and sophomore year!

I've already blogged about Drawing I, Drawing II, 2D Design, Color Theory, a project for Typography, and about a third of the good pieces for Photography.

(It's hilarious to go back and look at these old posts; not only have my skillsets grown since them, but my opinions and perspective on school have changed).

Click "read more" if you are reading this on the main page of my blog:

3D Design (Freshman)

3D design was, unfortunately, not the world's greatest class. It wasn't a sculpture class, and the projects were all over the place. Some of the other sections had interesting projects (the coolest sculptures made from books!) and others had really, really strange ones (hanging things made from glue, nylons, and toilet paper). Ours were, on the whole, pretty decent.

I'd like to share two of the projects for this class. The first is a sculpture version of M.C. Escher's Drawing Hands.

This was a paper mache project that was supposed to bring a famous 2D artwork "to life." I created an armature of wire and duct tape before attacking it with paper and glue. These little fake hands were enough in the Uncanny Valley to creep out my roommates.

If I were to do this again I would not do paper mache. It's a hassle and creates strange textures.

This thing now lives on my brothers' bedroom wall, adding a new level of creepiness to our family's collection of Escher posters and books!

The project pictured below was supposed to be a sort of kinetic sculpture, but it was mostly destroyed when I left it on a shelf in the classroom to dry overnight.

This thing is finally done. #artstudentprobs

A photo posted by Shaylynn Ann (@shealynnsfaerie) on Apr 14, 2014 at 2:56pm PDT

Some of my other projects including sticking rocks into a pile and photographing them, making some tiles with resin (without really good ventilation-- it stunk up the whole art building-- but the tiles turned out alright in the end), and a clay sculpture inspired by Barbara Hepworth. The last one turned out fairly well but I didn't take pictures before I gave it away.

Intro to Computer Graphic Design (Sophomore)

Freshman year was spent on gen-eds and "Foundation Studies" for the arts. We began classes in graphic design during sophomore year.

This first design class was another one which didn't reach my Favorites list, mostly because of several horror stories which have become the stuff of legend to the years below us.

That being said, despite it all I learned a lot about the technical side of using Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. I had taught myself before this, and had missed out on a lot of the logic behind the softwares.

We did weird projects like this vector drawing of the strange paper dolls pictured below. From an illustration perspective, this piece is horrific, but at least I learned the basics of vector artwork.

Our final project was a booklet of all the projects we created. Again, I learned a lot about the technical side of InDesign-- but from a design standpoint this booklet needs help!

Design Systems (Sophomore)

This was our first of many classes taught purely by a GA (the assistants weren't assisting anybody-- they taught the classes on their own on top of doing their graduate studies).

Honestly, I'm not sure what the point of Design Systems was, but I did come out of the class with some really cool projects.

Most of the design work consisted in projects like those above; good for training us to think or teaching software, but not polished work.

But some were pretty fun. One of the projects was to create mashups between animals and objects; I clearly went crazy with this one!

There's a Giraffe+Unicycle (obviously inspired by the Giraffe Unicycles that I want to learn to ride so badly; I can only ride the short ones), a Camel+Ship, a Needle+Fly, and a Peacock+Mirror.

In my opinion, the Peacock Vanity Mirror is one of the most hilariously punny things I've made and I now rival dad for Royal Pun Maker. :)

M.C. Escher meets Frank Lloyd Wright. We were given this finals assignment on Monday, and I managed to finish early! Now to work on other finals-- the end of the semester is in sight! #illustration #mcescher #escher #franklloydwright #fallingwater #printgallery #pencil #drawing #artstudent

A photo posted by Shaylynn Ann (@shealynnsfaerie) on Dec 3, 2014 at 1:26pm PST

And my favorite project was this pencil drawing for the final! It's a mashup between M.C. Escher's Print Gallery and Frank Lloyd Wright's famous building Fallingwater.

You know that a project is good when you work with a perspective grid this this!

Typography 1 (Sophomore)

This was the BEST CLASS EVER. Well, one of them. (It's tied with Color Theory, Drawing II, and Illustration II).

I don't have as much to show in the way interesting projects, but I learned so much about the theory and technical side of typography. While taking the class, we all worried over deadlines and complained about the amount of memorization work-- but now that its over I wish all my classes were like this one.

We began with logotypes and somehow I actually designed something slightly macarbe for once...

Then we spent a week obsessively adjusting kerning and letterspacing and then handtracing each sheet three times until it was perfect... I was so convinced that this was a stupid project, until I later realized that tracing each letterform made me intimately familiar with the tiniest details. This became very useful when studying the terminology of typography.

A few projects later, I drew over fifty letterforms with a rough brush dipped in India Ink, scanned them in and created about as many sketches, and worked with provided quotes to make typographic posters.

One portrays the meaning of the word "discordant," the other, "concordant."

We had many exercises on typographic hierarchy. A few projects later, we did presentations for famous typographers and posters inspired by their work for (fake) lecture series.

I spotted my typographer, Neville Brody, "in the wild" while watching NCIS-- one of his typefaces I researched is featured in the opening credits!

Our final project was, of course, the handmade books!!!!!!!! Check out the blog post about the book for many more pictures and some extensive project notes.

A quick summary of the project: I read and analyzed T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, created a series of illustrations, created a grid system and laid out the text, and printed and bound the books by hand. Sadly, the school kept my best copy and I'm going to try my darndest to get it back when I graduate because I really want it for my portfolio.

Graphic Production (Sophomore)

This graphic design class left me a lot of leeway to take the project prompts and do whatever I wanted, however I wanted to do it. So my classmates and I challenged each other to step outside of our comfort zone and try new techniques.

As with Design Systems, I'm not really sure what the class was about, but still came out of it with some interesting pieces.

First, we created twenty page booklets using a limited color scheme and provided photos and text.

The body copy called for an entire spread talking about the letterpress machine, but despite being a junior right now I've yet to actually see it in person. They keep it locked away in a tiny room and only occasionally have special topics courses on it.

These are two duotone book covers for the (curiously interesting and terribly creepy) book Codex Seraphinianus.

Duotone magazine spreads for an article about an architect.

Then there was this project... two wordless t-shirts. My assigned topics:

"Racism in the economy in South Africa"

and

"Racism in the economy in Romania"

Because that's easy research and put on a tshirt in one week. The Romanian one was a flop and there's no way I'm sharing it anywhere, ever.

This one, though, was by far my favorite! We were creating posters, album covers, and CD artwork for musicians or bands. I wasn't coming up with any good ideas until I stumbled across the work of Yuko Shimizu and decided to try to emulate some of her photoshop techniques.

Just some homework last night. It's fully inked now; today I start colorizing it in Photoshop. And people wonder why I never have any time. #artstudentproblems #artstudentprobs #inking #sketches #illustration #wip #homework

A photo posted by Shaylynn Ann (@shealynnsfaerie) on Apr 17, 2015 at 9:01am PDT

I drew the design by hand and then spent about ten hours learning how to mask off shapes and do my first ever digital painting.

Any chance to draw twisting vines and swirly water is fine by me!

The other musician I chose was Lindsey Stirling; I was clearly focused on playing-in-the-photoshop-sandbox when I made this. :)

Other

One of my gen-eds was a music class with a hilarious and intimidating professor. Our dreaded group project was actually very enjoyable; we made a quick stop-frame-animation video for Vivaldi.

The second semester of sophomore year was spent freaking out over the Candidacy Review.

Everyone wanting to take upper level art, design, and illustration courses has to create a portfolio to be judged. They limit the number of people allowed into the program, so the pressure was on. You don't want to have wasted your first two years of college. They worked this up so much-- in classes and at portfolio workshops, they told us that our whole future depended on the quality of the portfolio... if you don't mount every piece properly and cover it with the exact right kind of tracing paper and put each piece in its own expensive plastic sleeve, it proves that you have poor craftsmanship... do you really not have any better pieces to show off this technique? etc.

Yeah. None of us slept much the week of Reviews.

Happily, almost all of my classmates and I were accepted into the programs we were working for. I now officially have two comprehensive majors: Graphic Design and Illustration. My additional minor is Art History. I'm so glad that the reviews are in my past. The year below us is going through it right now, and I feel sorry for all the kids obsessively trimming and mounting drawings in the breaks between classes.

There is only one more class from Freshman year that I haven't blogged about: Metals 1!!! That blog post will be coming soon. :)

Entwife Circlet { Photoshoot }

noreply@blogger.com (Shaylynn) — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 01:08:00 +0000

When Spring unfolds the beechen leaf, and sap is in the bough;
When light is on the wild-wood stream, and wind is on the brow;
When stride is long, and breath is deep, and keen the mountain-air,
Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is fair!

-The song of the Ents and Entwives in The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

The commissions that make me the happiest are the crazy, intricate ones that I weave every ounce of magic into that I can. The Entwife headpieces (this is the fourth version) are among my favorites: they are crafted from pinecones, Czech glass, copper oxidized to several rich shades, creamy pearls, and weeping-willow chains.

I was thrilled to have a chance to take such beautiful photographs before shipping this piece out! Four friends joined me in a local park and we pranced around the autumn leaves right before sunset.

The original Entwife circlet was designed for a friend's Lord of the Rings costume just as I was beginning to sell jewelry. Since then, I've made some other variations; see those pictures here, here, and here.

This latest version featured extra wirewrapping and more beads than ever before. I also used six, yes, six, shades of green leaves. I believe it is being worn for a wedding this month!

The details show up better here; thank you to C. for being another model! You can see how much different head sizes affect the way that the headpiece fits.

I will be sharing additional pictures from our photoshoot soon!