Topic: Silver Boar - Small Status Update - 27th September 2016 - page 3. (Read 67888 times)

You'll have noticed I've been pretty quiet lately on this thread, mainly because I'm busy working! I currently have 9 Oval gemstone settings on the go ( two of which are from earlier and I've decided I'm going to get them finished off ) I also have a rectangle setting lying around that I need to finish and will find later to show you for a Roze Quartz gemstone, most of these I plan on turning into necklaces but I have a couple I will turn into earrings as well using some Malachites and Amethysts I have.







These ones are getting there, just need a bit more soldering and polishing and they'll be ready to go



On the drawing part of my work I think I have just about figured out after bickering with people what was going on with my artwork, artists will probably only get this and be interested but the rest of you will have definitely noticed how annoyingly flat my artwork was, well, turns out I can scientifically explain that now. The way I do artwork I practice my anatomy and memorise the shapes involved when creating characters, there is nothing wrong with the method I was using to learn as artists use it all the time, what I did wrong was I only memorised the front and side ( At this point I'm sure most Artists reading this will go DUH! but that shows you I'm still learning ) so whenever I tried to draw original characters using my knowledge of anatomy I would always revert to the front view by default because that was the only anatomy knowledge I had in my head, I had looked at angles but not enough. What made me realise this was that I had memorised how to draw a mannequin from several angles and could construct a character from several angles absolutely fine, but I just hadn't memorised the shapes I needed to draw for the full figure at the end stage from different angles.

Since you'd hardly draw manga directly from the front all of my work has ended up looking very flat and unrealistic even at times when I'm actually aiming for realism or I want something to look believable, I'm happy to report now though that I am now drawing at angles and everything is improving pretty dramatically, it will take a bit more work before I will show it but you'll see what I mean the moment it's posted up, I think I'll use that manga page I posted earlier as a way of comparing the two images.

Hopefully this will mean that I will be able to put out more artwork now and in greater quantities, in other Jewellery news I have done some researching and I know how to refine scrap silver etc. now, I have also found somebody who can professionally make me a Coin Dye ( Coin Stamp ) both of these processes will take some setting up, more research and also money, so it's something that I'm keeping in mind for the future, whether or not I can expand into coin minting and silver refining will depend on how well the products I have got planned sell.

I have gotten myself set up on the decentralised Twister: http://twister.net.co/

Feel free to add me, I'll be posting up updates there as well as on this thread. my username is "@lethn" I also have a seperate account for if you just want updates on my Jewellery "@silverboar".

As there is a crazy view count on this thread ( seriously guys wtf? ) here are some light and shadow studies I'm doing to improve my images.





I don't think I'm quite at the point where I can churn out fantastic images per week like a professional artist can but at least I've found I can make Jewellery well.

Small update on Jewellery! This week I learned how to make a pair of earrings, the setting is the same design but it's just got hooks attached to it rather than a chain.



Now I've gotten the general idea behind it I will be looking at designing earrings now as well as necklaces.

Just in case people notice a few changes I have found a payment processor again, this one also does Litecoin payments so if you want you can pay with that instead of Bitcoins, if anyone knows of any payment processors that offer up altcoins like coinpayments did I'd be happy to be pointed towards to them, especially if they're outside the U.S and support ubercart.

It's a common problem with forum software that just wasn't designed with foresight, phpbb3 forums for example doesn't even have a select all box when you look at members to help you delete lots of spammers that's why I just installed a chat room in frontier space instead, bots don't seem intelligent enough to spam those yet, all software has these weird quirks that are often fixed by modders etc.

Aha. I think I saw a thread asking about how you delete them, and it seems like you can't, oddly enough. Shouldn't be too hard for the admins to change, and I see no reason not to. Oh well.

Oh yeah, I don't know how to delete them or if you can delete them, had a poll up before so I just put in some letters to replace it, might put up a real one later though

What exactly is that poll for? Or was it just a mistake? x)

You guys have probably already seen it, but the payment processor I'm signed up with coinpayments.net is shutting down because of finCEN in America, to get round this I'm going to learn properly how to install the standalone ubercart module so that customers on the front end will be hardly affected by this but you will notice you can only pay in Bitcoin, I will search for alternatives in the meantime and see if I can maybe even get Litecoin installed onto my website as well but I'm not experienced so it will have to be something relatively simple to set up that can't fuck up the site easily if goes wrong.

I know I can be trollish at times and mess people about but to be serious for once I'd like to say to people who were pandering to the U.S government to make Bitcoin more 'accepted' the only purpose for U.S government regulation is to maintain the current monopoly over everything we use. finCEN and regulators like it don't give a damn about competition because they are owned by the very people who own the companies they are supposed to be regulating, because Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies like it in their inherent nature go against the idea of monopolies and centralisation anyone who comes forward to try and comply with them will be run into the ground before they can even get started.

If anyone is ever thinking of setting up their own financial services with cryptocurrencies or even a payment processor for example please, please avoid the U.S, other financial companies are actually actively avoiding doing business with America now precisely because of this kind of thing they don't welcome competition there and actively want to get rid of you or will rob you of everything you have. I can understand wanting to protect yourself from fraud and scammers, I've been scammed, but think twice before you go to people like the U.S government for it because small startups like mine and coinpayments won't be able to exist in such an environment.

You protect yourself from fraud through honesty with other people and common sense, not a faceless organisation of bureaucrats that would even try to manage our thoughts and feelings if they could get away with it.

Well I think I have to admit I've pretty much missed the internal deadline for my manga but it's almost finished, I got a pretty big chunk of work done, I'll be sure to post an update up when I've gotten it finished for sure, what's interesting about this is I'm learning how how my brain actually draws up images before I draw them in real life for you to all see. I don't know whether my way of working is different from other peoples but unfortunately my thought process is extremely stubborn and I can't rush it or anything like that like some people seem to be able to.

The next time you see me post about my manga, I'll be posting up the finished product, no dates for that of course in the mean time I'll keep posting updates of my Jewellery which is a lot more systematic and something I can usually do almost any time.

For those who don't know and are interested, when you start off an image you have to imagine it first and what happens to me is I almost get art block where I'm unable to draw specific parts of my drawing until my brain has figured it out and I have to sit down and think on it until I have enough of the complete image in my head so I can draw again. This is something me and my teacher have been figuring out awhile now and I'm starting to get used to it so but as I've said before it does mean that I work very sporadically and can't realistically work to a deadline.


Just so you can see, this is a classic Lethn WIP, there are nice details in places, some of it looks finished and then there are some really horrid unfinished bits THAT PISS ME OFF! >_< so I don't mind if you want to have a rant about how bad it looks this gives you an idea of what I've been ranting about though and why I haven't posted a lot up yet. I also desperately want to get a cintiq because I'm drawing directly onto a bamboo tablet and a cintiq would make life a lot easier for me ( With the bamboo tablet it's pretty small and it's like you're drawing blind folded because you don't have a screen to directly draw on ) and is why I'm postponing work on Frontier Space in favour of some shorter mangas where I can get away with not-so-great artwork.

Casting!

As I've mentioned in various places I've been learning how to do casting, first with cuttlefish bone where I ended up with a sort of blob which I tried to turn into a sort of droplet and then I tried to make a small castle from solid silver through delft clay casting. While the accuracy of the casting process itself was fantastic and I can also re-use the wax moulds whenever I want to make a silver piece in delft clay casting, my wax moulds aren't great at all so I need to get better at carving and shaping them.

I'll be sure to post more updates for you as I progress along with my casting as well as on the handmade stuff as well, learning casting properly will allow me to be a bit more competitive and enable me to make more complex shapes that otherwise would be pretty tedious or difficult by hand.

Droplet made by using a cuttlefish bone for casting







Castle attempt, includes the blue wax mould used to make it, created by imprinting the wax into clay and pouring the silver into the space left behind - WIP it might look better once it's cleaned up and polished

Here are the WIPs of the oval necklaces I'm making, I'm planning on setting them with Amber and Garnet, I almost have the bases finished and then I'll just need to put on the jump ring and then do lots of sanding and polishing.

Garnet Oval Necklace WIP









Amber Oval Necklace WIP

Since posting embarassing selfies seems to be the way to gain trust on this forum and I want trust I've decided to post up a photo of myself I'm definitely not some scam artist trying to stalk these boards to screw people over.



Now I must stop procrastinating and go back to making more stuff >_<

Good news! I just got some Silver sheet metal so over the weekend and now I'm feeling better after getting a stupid cold in the past couple of weeks I'll be able to get some oval gemstone settings made, expect to see a new variety of necklaces getting stocked with slightly bigger gemstones, these new necklaces will have a slightly higher price to reflect the material cost.

I'd also like to mention for those curious that I've done the muscle construction for my manga now, I refuse to give any firm dates for the release of my products ( I'm not making the mistake other companies make constantly >_< ) but I'm optimistic that I'll get close to finishing the damn thing in three weeks at most depending on how well I work.

I'm still doing some tweaking and will continue to update as usual but I now have a separate site up for all my Jewellery, I will be posting photos of my stuff up on the main page along with keeping this thread updated too, let me know if anything is broken!

http://www.silverboarjewellery.com/

I have reduced the price for my necklaces to 0.05BTC, will be posting a link to the Jewellery website towards the end of the week.

I'm doing some updating/rebranding and will be splitting the Jewellery and Artwork so my websites make a bit more sense and are organised, I'll post a link up when I've got it working, just thought I'd explain why the Jewellery stuff suddenly disappeared from the store.

Not sure there's much more I can say beyond what I've chatted about on these boards, I've been learning to make Jewellery for about a year now and been learning artwork for longer, I'm based in the UK in Yorkshire. I'd be happy to ship anywhere internationally if it's all legal and if you want to use a reputable escrow I'm open to that too.

Hi there, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and where you are from?  It helps to market yourself, since you make the jewelry.  Can you ship to the USA?  I am interested in the blue stone necklace.  (iolite)