Three Ducks

This picture, picture of three ducks, was taken years ago and found its way to my business card as well as appeared (and disappeared) on a few of my profiles on social media. And now, here comes a jewellery piece...

As seen on the business card, my motto says 'analyse & create'. And that is what happened here.

These three ducks in a row that rip through the water are adding some action to the composition. The simplicity of this image stuck to my mind and I just knew that the right time will come and I will do something with it. But as it often goes with the way I work, it had to mature...

I started experimenting with straightforward crochet pattern adding beads to it to 'draw' the subject (the three ducks in a row). What you can see here is one of many samples I made when looking into colour, size, pattern, positive vs negative space,...

I also started to wonder how to shape the 2D piece into 3D. Why 3D you ask? Why not. The image is frozen in time but some action is depicted there, action made by live creatures. How would I translate this into the design?...

At one point, I remembered a project ('Flipped to a new life') where I used home-made Mod Podge (made from mixing a PVA glue and water for a picture transfer onto a wood). As I understand, Mod Podge has many uses so I decided to use another of them...

...shaping here, hoping to evoke the movement of ducks through water. At the same time I 'shaped' a line where the ducks should be and where I intended to push a cord/chain through. An idea of a necklace with a pendant started to emerge...

Since I picked green in this sample for the pendant , I decided to make a chain out of a black wire, a colour that I knew would compliment it well. After some time making Viking weave I ended with a chain that when pushed through the pendant looks fantastic...

What I was not sure about here though was the angle the piece takes on the chain. Some rethinking had to be done in relation to how to attach the pendant to the chain keeping the right angle.

A few projects, a few experiments and some relaxing time later, I returned to the original picture of three ducks in a row, the one that stuck to my mind, and finally completed the piece. Using only a section of a chain to suggest the ducks and their movement in the water I made a different chain that is helping me to keep preferred angle of the pendant. To finish it all, I made a pair of earrings to make a set. (In fact, I had some bits left over so decided to use them further ;-)

How to summarise here? Perhaps by saying that by analysing, more design possibilities are discovered within a single image. Here it is strong standing alone, it makes a great background for my business card and is a starting point to a design piece, this time a pendant. Hence my motto, analyse & create.

K-)