Working it out

Do you ever get that feeling, you know you have an idea, but its hiding from you, and you cant quite get it out of your head and into life ?

I have been having that itchy feeling for a little while and so I thought I would share how I have been working it out.

I wanted to "draw" flowers on my beads. but not just any old flowers, special flowers. With details. And fine stringers (because we know I have a fine stringer addiction right ?).

So, I started doodling in glass.

The first one I did is at the bottom, working through to the top one. Grotty arent they !! 

They were intended as quick "sketches" in glass, checking how things look, how the glass behaves, how much it moves / distorts as you layer up the details, practising skills that will be needed to make this work. Althogh for quick sketches some of them took rather a lot of time to do !

By the time I got to that top one I was getting grumpy. I could see in my mind clearer now what I was wanting to achieve but it just didnt seem to be working in the glass. And then the brainwave hit.

I sat down with a piece of paper and drew what I wanted. Then I drew it again. and again. Messing with spacing, numbers of elements, fiddling around until, on paper, it looked how I wanted. 

From a design point of view, this is called doing things back to front !!! But for me, I needed that technical information and feedback from working with the glass to get my idea out in the first place. The drawing allowed me to refine the details of that idea much quicker than I could have in glass. 

And this is one of my new flowers on a cabochon

Im looking forward to making many more and seeing where the idea takes me !