Meet the Lionfish

I've been trying to come up with an image for the back of my business card for a while now. (I posted an image of the front a while back, which was a rendering of "C. Sharpe" in gold.) My main problem was that I wanted an image that was representative of the work that I actually make, not just things that I render. Largely what that meant was that I didn't really want to render it in gold, since I never work in gold. I sort of put the cards on the back burner while I worked on other things, waiting to come up with the right image.

In the meantime, I went back to an idea that I'd been thinking about right around graduation, which was the idea of wearing images of jewelry as jewelry. Mostly this was spurred by my rendering class, and some of the things that came out of it. I found myself looking at some of the renderings and thinking, "I don't want to make this, I just want to wear this rendering." Which presented some logistical problems, such as how exactly one wears a rendering, along with imbuing it with value at the same time. Well, it finally occurred to me a month or two ago that there was an obvious solution to my problem, at least in part: buttons, or those little round pins you see in stores, usually with somewhat witty sayings on them. And a quick Google search proved that it really was a viable option. I could take a rendering and have it made into buttons fairly inexpensively. I only had to come up with a design that would fit into a 1" circle. Easier said than done.

I started brainstorming and thinking about my work, since I wanted both the buttons and my business card image to be representative of my work. The things I came up with were pretty obvious: I work in silver or copper, sometimes with enamels, and I work with animal imagery. As much as I love to render stones, I hardly ever use them in my work. So stones were out. So was my gold palette. It would have to be silver, since I think it's a little more striking than copper, and gives a better sense of (material) value as well. And then it occurred to me that I've been focusing on fish again lately, between the copper lionfish chasing and the small silver fish chasing. So I'd do a fish. And I loved the lionfish, although he certainly wouldn't fit into a circle. So I redesigned the lionfish, and made him into something that isn't a lionfish at all (although I still think of him as one). I'm pretty pleased with the result. He'll be on both my buttons and my business card, both of which I've ordered. If the buttons turn out nicely, I may make more in other designs, but I'm definitely going to do fairly small runs, in a limited edition manner. We'll see- I'll post photos of the buttons as soon as my order comes in!



I also repainted the front of my business cards in silver on the same blue, since I thought the old one with the new silver lionfish would look terrible. The gold rendering will be the opening to my rendering portfolio though, so it definitely wasn't a waste.