Jewel Creatures

 A number of years ago I started making jewelry in the form of a variety of creatures, mostly using copper and mixed metal designs and coloring the copper with heat. A lot of these designs are pin/pendants. I've always been fond of frogs so some of my first designs were those.
I've probably made 20 to 30 frogs in a variety of sizes and patterns over the last 25 to 30 years.

Turtles seemed like  an interesting form also so a few of them made an appearance also. Perhaps a half a dozen or so.

A few of the frogs I made in more complex designs like this frog on a leaf. I made one as a bola tie also.

I've probably made as many fish as I have frogs, this design I called my swirly fish. It has a pearl eye, silver swirls and gold balls and discs.

I've made 4 or 5 snail forms at times that I was infatuated with spiral forms.

Insects have always fascinated me also , I've taken hundreds of close up pictures of them with my digital cameras. Many of them seem like little moving jewels to me. I've also done a great many leaf forms like this copper one. When I lived in Nevada City 25 years ago, on one fall day I was walking through my back yard which bordered a creek and had huge oak trees and there were piles of leaves on the ground. As my feet pushed them around I thought to myself -they look like copper-. That rang a bell in my head and I started playing with making them out of copper that I colored with heat.

This is a more abstract bug form that I did a couple of years ago.

A few years ago my daughter Akeesa asked me to make a dragonfly pendant for her and that got me into creating a series of dragonflies, all a little different. This one is silver with a few gold elements and freshwater pearl eyes.

Maybe 20 years ago I made my first lizard form based on a series of drawings I was doing at the time. I've done perhaps 6 to 8 in this series, each a little different in texture and metal mixtures.

I have a really good customer in the San Francisco bay area that sometimes rescues abandoned iguanas. She has been asking me for about 5 or 6 years to make her an iguana pendant, even sending me large photographs of some of the iguanas she has had. I don't do very many special orders any more but wanted to do this one for her but it took a long time for the finished piece to be born. I finally got it done this spring and we were both happy with the finished piece. I do wish I had taken more time to get a better picture of it though. Oh well.