Creating A Jewelry Line
whimsical art turned into beautiful trinkets
A couple years ago I was twiddling my thumbs. I thought I needed to work on something physical, something I was passionate about. I wanted to make jewelry that I would wear that I've never seen before. I gave myself a deadline of two weeks to create all the jewelry for my little collection. Drafting all the art I needed and materials for putting the jewelry together ended up taking a little over three weeks. But I think it was all worth it; it was very fun to do and I can't wait to make more someday. Read below to learn more about this project and see all the drop earrings!
What Compelled Me
Earlier in my art journey I was just a little pleb, I thought that making items and selling them online would be easy-peasy if only I just had the product to put out there. I asked a friend to lend me $200 and made two keychain designs. Since they were cute angel and devil chibis they would surely sell. It didn't matter that I only had a few followers online... Well, that turned out to be a real learning moment. None of them sold, only family had bought a few of them. I couldn't get rid of them. I actually ended up throwing them away since I was disappointed seeing them whenever I would reorganized my room!
Maybe that's why it took me around a decade to create some products again. I tried to design items that could be liked by many different personalities. So overall I would say the collection isn't that cohesive but it is all my art. And if I wanted to really break it down, there are three categories: witchy, nature, and cat themed. Boy do I love cats. These designs are everything I would wear but haven't seen done before. Especially the angel and devil cats with wings.
All those years of saving packaging designs on Pinterest paid off. Since the jewelry was so colorful and whimsy I decided on sleek and simple packaging where the main focus would be on the earrings. Although I would love to go all out and buy little boxes for everything, most packaging does get thrown away so I kept that in mind and the packaging you see here is what I went with.
So the first step was figuring out what I wanted to make, I did a lot of research. I combed through the seven-thousand likes on my Pinterest boards. Went through my Etsy favorites etc. I then Googled if certain designs had been done before. After several days of prepping, I got to work drawing them on my Cintiq. Since most earrings ranged from the 1 inch to 2.5 inches in size it wasn't hard to pop them out. The ones that took the longest to make was the Dancing Swallows and Magical Mystical Carousel sun catchers. I printed out so many pages to test out whether the crystals and findings would fit in the final charm.
I had two weeks to finish all the designs. I went over the two weeks and had to contact the manufacturer to give me an extra week. I think the biggest struggle was the mental hurdle to just do it. To not worry about the final product and what people might think about it or if it would be successful or not. After forcing myself to push through, the earring designs were submitted. Now was the waiting game for them to all come. During that time I did the math on what findings I needed, how many, and what the cost for each earring would be to make. Also purchasing the tools to put them all together. This was going to be the undertaking of a lifetime, because it was just me.
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It took around a month or two to put all the jewelry together and package them up. I think in total I had around 750 charms which would be 325 earrings. Wow, doing the math again right now for this write up... I can't believe I was able to do all that. Since it's been slow and steady business I've decided that my new endeavor would be switching things up a bit. Focusing on my art and creating art prints. I do hope to make more jewelry in the future; especially ones that I've sculpted myself.
