photographing your work / making a portfolio in illustrator

john cage: some rules for students and teachers

RULE ONE: 

Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.

RULE TWO: 

General duties of a student - pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: 

General duties of a teacher - pull everything out of your students. 

RULE FOUR: 

Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE: 

be self-disciplined - this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: 

Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail, there's only make.

RULE SEVEN: 

The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: 

Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.

RULE NINE: 

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: 

"We're breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities." (John Cage)

HINTS: 

Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything - it might come in handy later. 

ASSIGNMENT #4            

Professional packet, packaging and logo

For the purposes of self-promotion, you are to create a professional packet that will require you to create a series of documents that all professional artists always have available. 

You will include:

a short biography

a 1-page resume

a curriculum vita 

logo

Images of your work 

All documents should be on letter head or somehow includes your logo/watermark.

Photographs should be shot well and edited into the document.

The entire document should be saved as a PDF. 

CV versus Resume

Three major differences between CVs and resumes are the length, the purpose and the layout. A resume is a brief summary of your skills and experience over one or two pages, a CV is more detailed and can stretch well beyond two pages. The resume will be tailored to each position whereas the CV will stay put and any changes will be in the cover letter.

A CV has a clear chronological order listing the whole career of the individual whereas a resume’s information can be shuffled around to best suit the applicant. I would say the main difference between a resume and a CV is that a CV is intended to be a full record of your career history and a resume is a brief, targeted list of skills and achievements.

Let’s revise:

CV – long, covers your entire career, static
Resume – short, no particular format rule, highly customizable

Bios/Biography

What should be in your bio?

History 

Where were you born? where are you from?  Is it relevant?

Education 

Do you have a degree?  Where is it from? When will you earn your degree?

Other relevant information 

Awards? teaching? assistantships?  notable events?

Exhibitions 

Have you had any? Do not list them all? Which are the most important?

Sum it up 

What do you do?  Where are your interests?  Could you borrow language from your statement?

MEGAN AUMAN

Megan Auman is a designer, metalsmith, educator, and entrepreneur who has built a multi-faceted business around her passion for great design and sustainable business. Her eponymous jewelry line is sold in stores across the US and online. Her designs have been featured in Design Sponge, Better Homes and Gardens, Cooking Light, and more. In 2009, Megan founded Designing an MBA to help designers and makers develop their business skills. Since then, she has created a number of successful e-courses, including Marketing for Makers, Wholesale Academy, and Do/Teach. She is a frequent speaker on pricing, wholesale, and business thinking for creatives.

SETH PAPAC

Seth Papac received his BFA in Jewelry/Metalsmithing (2004) from the University of Washington and his MFA in Jewelry/Metalsmithing (2009) from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Seth’s work is exhibited and published in Europe as well as the United States. He is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a Peter S. Reed Foundation NY, NY grant as well as the Tobey Devan Lewis Fellowship. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR and the Rotasa Foundation, Mill Valley, CA. For the past few years he has been a Lecturer in the Jewelry and Metalwork Department at San Diego State University.

NOAM ELYSHIV

Born and raised in Israel, Noam Elyashiv received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and her Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. Noam has received several awards for design excellence including The America-Israel Cultural Foundation Award, the Absolut Vodka Emerging Artist Award and a Fellowship in crafts from the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts. Noam’s artwork derives from her interest in correlations and interactions between line, plane and volume. She captures the precision and linear quality of her drawings in metal. Since 1994 Noam has been on the teaching faculty of the Jewelry + Metalsmithing program at Rhode Island School of Design.

MYRA MIMLITSCH-GRAY

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray earned her Master of Fine Arts degree at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1986, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Philadelphia College of Art in 1984. A Professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, Mimlitsch-Gray received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1998. She is the recipient of the 2016 American Craft Council Award and has been inducted into its College of Fellows. Other awards include Individual Artist Fellowships in Crafts/Sculpture from the New York Foundation for the Arts(2014, 1997, 2005); the United States Artists Glasgow Fellowship in Craft and Traditional Arts (2012), and Artist Fellowships from the Tiffany Foundation (1995), the National Endowment for the Arts (1994), and a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation (2016).

In 2014 the Metal Museum in Memphis Tennessee named Mimlitsch-Gray "Master Metalsmith" and presented her first museum retrospective, Staging Form. A solo show, In/Animate: Recent Work by Myra Mimlitsch-Gray is curated by Akiko Busch and on exhibit through December 2016 at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. Her work has been featured at venues such as Sienna Patti Contemporary, Wexler Gallery, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and is currently on view at the Museum of Arts and Design, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Mimlitsch-Gray's publications include: In/Animate: Recent Work by Myra Mimlitsch-Gray (SUNY Press, NY 2016); Staging Form (Metal Museum, 2014); Makers: A History of American Studio Craft (UNC Press, Chapel Hill, 2010); Craft in America- Celebrating Two Centuries of Artists and Objects (Random House, 2007); 100 Treasures (Cranbrook Art Museum, 2004); Skilled Work- American Craft in the Renwick Gallery(Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998); Women Designers, 1900-2000: Diversity and Difference (Yale University Press, 2000); and One of a Kind: American Art Jewelry Today (Abrams, 1995). A feature article, “Of Hammers, History and Household: The Metalwork of Myra Mimlitsch-Gray”, by David McFadden, was published in Metalsmith, Spring 2005.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Learn to avoid common mistakes in jewelry product photography and make your jewelry product photos shine in just 10 simple steps.

More articles on shooting your work.

https://www.ganoksin.com/article/cost-effective-small-scale-jewelry-photography/

https://www.ganoksin.com/article/lighting-jewelry-small-object-photography/





Logos/identity systems

https://www.pinterest.com/explore/jewelry-logo/








Illustrator layout pro-tips

• Drag+alt will copy elements 
• Spacebar drag will move your canvas
• alt scroll will zoom
• Apple 5 or command 5 will allow you to make a guide from a vector shape.
• Apple D or alt D will redo the last command 
• F will toggle through views
• Apple Y or command Y will allow you to view in outline mode
• Apple 7 or command 7 will create a clipping mask to mask images (be careful with the order)
• Apple 2 or command 2 to lock selection
• If you have full bleed images behind text, reduce the opacity

ASSIGNMENT #5    

Production model and projections

Create a production piece!  

Do a mock setup/proposal/ for putting a piece into limited production. 

Start from the beginning before you start thinking about about to make. 

Will you pay yourself an hourly wage? 

What would be worth putting into production?  

What will it be made of? 

What is the best way to do a limited run? 

How much would it cost to make it? 

Is there a better way to make it?  

Where will you sell it?  

How much will it cost to sell it? 

Will you have to package it? Gallery? 

Etsy? 

Handmade market? 

Try to think of everything. Create a spreadsheet to help calculate costs. Present a “business proposal” for your limited production object. Make a model for a casting or a visual reference (could be a 3D print). 

Include your identity system from Assignment #4 (This project may turn into a departmental fund raiser project.  Think badge, button or coin!) Gather pricing from local casting companies or utilize online outsourcing to create a pricing structure. Time yourself actually designing/ printing/ molding/ casting/ finishing a piece. 

This is a great exercise just in case you need to support yourself with your work!