Creating Simple Wearable Art Pendants

1. Creating Simple Wearable Art Pendants Intro: Have you ever wanted to try your hand at making wearable art pendants? Then I have the class for you. Do you will need to come prepared with some artwork that you would like to turn into a pendant. Then I will guide you step-by-step through the process. We will properly measure the bezel and use our cricket machine to properly cut out the exact size of the artwork that we need for our pieces. Then we will go over the proper glues to use and learn about mounting our glass Cabot Sean's on top of your artwork and less but not least, we will go over mounting your certified Cabo Sean's into their respective pendant bezels. This class aims to be simple and straightforward, and this is a project that you could conceivably do over the course of a weekend and wind up with lovely pendants to gift or to sell. It's also perfect for any established artists who would like to figure out more ways to make their art wearable. So join me, won't you? And let's make some lovely wearable art this weekend. See you in class. Bye. 2. Lesson 01: Preparing Your Art for the Pendant Bezels.: Hello everyone and welcome to lesson one on creating your own handmade art pendants of the most important things you're going to need for this lesson are the pendant vessels. And they're matching capital Sean's. This set here I just ordered off of Amazon. They're fairly inexpensive and this set was actually pretty nice. First thing you're going to want to do is to select which pendant vessel you want to work with. This lesson, I will be using the circular pendant vessel because that works best with the artwork I'm planning on using. You of course, should use whatever is going to work best for your artwork. Here you can see that I am measuring my bezel just from the interior lip to the other interior lip with the circular one, it is one inch by one inch, and this is going to be my maximum dimension for my artwork. Another possible way for you to measure, to find out your maximum artwork width and height is two. Go ahead and measure the cabbage on. You will see that the cabbage Sean's measurement, of course, matches your bezel. Now it's time to check out the illustration that you would like to turn into an art pendant For me. I'm doing this cute little corky in flowers pendant. And of course, I'm using the digital medium, but you can do this with other mediums as well. So the first thing I plan to do with this artwork is to go and choose the circular selection tool. And I'm going to press Shift while I draw the circular selection tool. And this is going to create a perfect circle. If you don't press Shift while you're drawing the circle, it's going to become an oval. And you don't want that. If you are making a circular pendant like I am here, you can see I've plotted it out. And you can adjust the direction of your circle if you need to center your art work better just by tapping your arrow keys. You also don't need to concern yourself about the artwork size yet either. So what I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna go ahead and delete everything outside of my artwork. This the perfect circle that is going to fit into my pendant later. Now I'm going to go ahead and select the artwork. And then I'm going to open a new document. And this new document, you are going to set it up. So it is one inch by one inch. You do this because that is the size of our bezel. And as for DPI, you can keep it at any high resolution for printing that you want because you are going to be printing these out. I keep it at around 300 for Recolor Artwork. Then you are going to go ahead and paste your art work into the small little one inch by one inch document. Of course, I was working in 600 dpi, so it's twice as large as it needs to be. So I'm just going to have to shrink it down. And you can shrink down your artwork so it fits perfectly within the one inch by one inch frame that we have. And this is what we're going to import into the cricket. We're going to print it out and we are going to cut them. If you don't have a cricket machine, don't worry because you can completely just use the scissors and cut these out. Or an X-Acto knife or whatever you have lying around. Alright, so now that I have my artwork perfect, perfectly sized to the document, I am going to go ahead and do a test print first. I think it's always a good idea to do a test print on cheap paper before you get out. You're more expensive materials and waste your time and money. And also at this point, you are going to want to go ahead and save your document because you don't want to lose all that work. Alright, so here I have my little test print, and I'm going to put it next to my pendant vessel. And it looks like everything is about on target, but I'm going to cut this out first to double-check and make sure everything is going to work. I am going to just cut this out with my scissors. It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to get the job done. Because obviously it's just a test print. You can see here that my cut is not completely perfect. So yours doesn't need to be perfect either. Like I said, it just needs to get the job done. And next we're going to go ahead and pop it in the bezel and make sure that it fits. And it does. If yours doesn't happen to fit, It's no worries. Just go back into your image editing program and double-check your sizes. Maybe printed a little bit smaller and just do another test until you get it right. Now you might be thinking. Amy, I would like to use the ovals. How do we deal with that? And I say, Don't worry, I've got you covered. We're gonna go ahead and we're going to measure up these bad boys, just like we did with the circles. We will go ahead and grab our trusty ruler. And we are going to measure the oval at the widest point. But ensure you're measuring right inside the lip of the bezel. And as you can see here, this one is about three-quarters of an inch or 0.75. And next we're going to go ahead and measure from top to bottom. And that looks like it's about exactly an inch. So we can go ahead and write down those measurements. And then you're going to want to follow this next very important step. We're going to want to take a nice close-up photograph of the bezel. I went ahead and put the ruler in there and I made a couple of marks on this piece of paper just to keep track of things, but you probably don't need to go to that trouble, but you can if you want to. And what we're going to do then is we're going to import this into our digital imaging program. Here, I'm importing the image into Clip Studio Paint. And then we're going to go ahead and do that. And I'm going to need to turn it around. And I'm going to go ahead and hit the blue line on it just so it's easier to differentiate my selections. And then I'm gonna go ahead and zoom way in so I can get really exact. Now rather than trying to just freehand guests your oval shape, you're going to want to go ahead and pull down some guides from your rulers at the top and the side of your document. Here, I'm gonna go ahead and pull down some guides. And I'm going to line them up with right inside the lip of the bezel. And I'm gonna do this for all sides. Now what this is going to do is it's going to allow you to draw an oval from the top left-hand corner of your square. And it's going to snap to your guides and create the perfect oval in that shape. Of course, I don't know what happened here. I made a little boo-boo. So I'm going to end up redrawing it again because yeah, my hands shifted or something. But no worries. You can always redo it. Now, I don't have any oval artwork prepared, but I am going to drop this hot pink color inside the selected area on another layer above the image. You don't want to do this on the photograph. And there we have a nice perfect oval that should be in the same ratios as that pendant bezel. You're going to follow the same instructions that you did with the circular basil. And you were just going to go ahead and copy and paste your oval into a new document that is the exact size that we wrote down, which was 0.75 by one inch. And again, I'm working at 600 DPI, so I had to shrink this down. But if you're working at 300 DPI, you won't have this problem. Alright, so at this point we should have our artwork all prepared and test printed. And I'm gonna go ahead and end this lesson here. And we're going to pick up with the next lesson. We're going to run these through the cricket maker and cut them out and get to gluing them inside the bezels. And as always, thank you for joining me on this journey and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. Have a great day. Bye bye. 3. Lesson 2: Paper Types, Printing and Cutting.: Hello everyone and welcome to lesson two on creating your very own wearable art pendants. We left off in the last lesson with having made a nice circular pendant design. And we test printed it to make sure it was going to fit and everything. And now this lesson, what we're going to do is we're going to import these files into the cricket. And we're gonna get the cricket to cut out our little pendants circles. And we're going to start making these pendants. First step, we're gonna go ahead and open our Cricket Design space and we're going to create a new cutting document. Once we are in that document, we're going to go ahead and click Upload. And we're going to go ahead and load a new image and browse, and we're going to search for our file and open it up. Now this is a complex design. So we're gonna go ahead and choose complex. And now I'm going to erase all the white on the outside. And as you can see here, when I go ahead to click the white section, it ends up going ahead and grabbing the blue section as well. And we obviously don't want this, so now it's time to undo that and go down into more options. And scrolling down, it'll give you a coat color tolerance. And you'll want to dim that down to just where you can erase the white without the leading your background. If you're using pastel colors like me. But if you weren't using pastel colors, you might not have this problem. Once you have your cut areas perfectly selected. I do like to zoom in and just make sure that there aren't any straggling pixels or anything that will make unpleasant to work with. So that's just what I like to do. Now you're going to go ahead and apply this to your piece. And we're gonna do a print and cut. So we're gonna select printIn cut. And then we're gonna go ahead and click the Upload button. Now, after we click the Upload button, it should happily show up in your little file area. Here it is. And we're going to want to go ahead and click on that and import it into our document. And there we go, there we have it. Now you may notice that this is a bit larger than the one inch pendant they were supposed to be making. This is because I use a higher DPI to print. So what I'm going to need to do is to shrink this down to the one-by-one size. I find that the easiest way to adjust this is just to go up to the dimensions and go ahead and set it one-by-one. Or in this case, you really do want to set it just a scooch, a bit smaller than one inch by one inch, like 0.99. That way you don't run into any problems of it fitting inside your bezel. Now because I don't want to waste paper. I'm gonna go ahead and make a bunch of copies of this. And I'm just going to start lining them up within the crickets print and cut dimensions. And if I'm remembering correctly, the print and cut maximum dimensions is roughly around six by nine. I would also like to take a moment while I'm jockeying these little files around to say that if you don't have a cricket machine, you are more than welcome to use scissors to cut these out. You can use an exacto knife and you can get just as nice of pieces as you can with a cricket maker or a cricket air, whatever you have is just that the cricket makes it easier. Alright, so once you have all of your little cup files laid out as you want them, then what I like to do is I like to select the whole lot of them. I like to group them and then don't forget that you need to attach all of them together. Otherwise, the cricket is going to want to print out each one on a different sheet of paper and cut each one individually if you've done it correctly, when the cut window pops up, all of these will be on the same page. So again, you want to group them and attach them. Don't forget to attach them. And once everything is ready, you can go ahead and click Make it. Before we go ahead and send this to the printer, I thought I would discuss a little bit about what types of paper to use for me. I really enjoy using Red Rivers paper. And for this project, I'm using a £47 premium matte paper that I normally use for my mini comic covers. Whenever I print them, I feel it's got a substantial amount of weight to it and it prints nicely. The colors are nice on this one. It's a bit like printing on their Aurora white art paper. The only other thing I would suggest is avoid glossy papers and definitely avoid the metallic pearl papers because the cricket will have difficulty reading the lines on your paper and it will make its cuts will be way off. So avoid the pearl and avoid glosses. Also be aware that if you use a thicker sheets of paper, there's more of a likelihood that your Cabo Sean will not be able to nest inside the bezel bed with your paper. So you want to avoid that as well. And last but not least, whenever you print these, as soon as you put a cab ocean on top of your print, it is going to make your print look a little bit lighter than how it actually printed out. So you may want to go ahead and advance and print these just a little bit darker to get the colors that you want. So now back to the project. I'm going to go ahead and click Make it. And then you are going to see the print preview pop-up. And as you can see, all of the little pieces are on the same document. So we're ready to go there. And we are ready to go ahead and send it to the printer. In the print window. It is my personal preference to go ahead and remove the add bleed. And I do like to see the printer dialog box and my print dialog is satisfactory. So I'm gonna go ahead and print it. Now with this type of paper, I am going to select the photo paper option which I have startup here, and it's easy for me to grab. If you need to search for it, you'll just have to browse and just find photo paper under your options and choose that. I'm gonna go ahead and use the default setting for this paper. And just as you would do with any other print and cut project, you're going to take your printout and you're gonna go ahead and line it up on your regular old cutting mat and slept that puppy on there and make sure it's on there, nice and good. And we're gonna go ahead and load it up in the machine. And you are free to load it up when the arrow light is flashing and go ahead and hit the arrow light to load it up. After it's loaded, go ahead and hit the cricket button and it'll start cutting. If everything went correctly and you've unloaded it. When you curl your cutting mat, they should just all kind of pop up and pop off of there. And it's satisfying whenever you have such a nice cut like this, where you can just bend your cutting mat and they all just want to pop right off. And now you should be left with a bunch of little tiny pieces of art to make pendants with. And I'm gonna go ahead and end this lesson here. And we will pick up in the next lesson and start assembling these pendants. I hope you've had an enjoyable class time and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. Have a great day. Bye bye. 4. Lesson 3: Assembling our Pendants!: Hello everyone and welcome to lesson three on creating your very own wearable art pendants. We ended the last lesson having printed and cut out all of our pendant artworks. In this lesson, we're going to begin assembling our pendants and we're going to start with gluing are Campbell Sean onto our artwork. The glue that I like to use for this phase is the mod podge dimensional magic. This glue dries perfectly clear and it also has the added effect of ceiling in your artwork. With everything prepared, we're going to go ahead and put a little dollop of glue right in the middle of your artwork. This much glue is the right amount. Now we're going to carefully grab our kava Sean, making sure that we don't touch the bottom. And we're going to press this down onto the art work, making sure that the glute squeezes out all the way to the edge. If the Cabo Sean wiggles around like it did on me, just go ahead and re-center it on the piece and give it a good squash for any glue that may completely squeeze out between the paper and the glass, you can just wipe it away. Now if you're human like me, you're probably going to have a few little blue accidents. So my tip is to go ahead and take some isopropyl alcohol, then grab a trustee Q-tip. And you're just going to gently dab away any little blobs of blue that wind up on the surface of the glass. If you don't have these supplies, this glue is water-soluble, so you can just take a damp paper towel and wipe away the glue as well. Here's a little clip of me applying cabbage ions to a couple more pieces just so you can kind of see me do it correctly rather than make a bunch of mistakes. And here I go. I've put it on there. You can see how the glue squeezes out all the way to the edge. The Press it. I make sure it's centered how I want it. And then I'm going to set it aside and leave it alone to dry. After they have completely dried, you're gonna go ahead and give him a little test in your bezel. And you can see on this particular one, the artwork has slid out a little bit from underneath the cobblestone and it's not quite going to fit. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to gently sand the paper off with a little nail file. Of course you want to be very careful while doing this. And you only want to file the paper and you do not want to scratch the glass. Typically when you're sanding, you want to approach it from the backside or at a slight angle towards the glass. But do not sand directly on the side. Here with just a little bit of sanding, I was able to get this Cabo Sean to fit nicely within the vessel. Okay. So once you have your art defied Cabo Sean's dried and ready, it's time to glue these into the bezels. The glue I will be using is crafters pick the ultimate bills itself as being the only water-based superglue. And this is what I use and I feel that it works pretty darn well. Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead and add a fairly generous blob of glue here to each of the bezels. Then I'm gonna go ahead and get out this silicon rubber tipped. It's actually a clay tool that I have for sculpting. And I'm actually going to use this to paint the glue onto the surface of the bezels because it washes out a lot easier. And I don't have any junk brushes right now to paint blue on to things. So I find it pretty useful and I probably won't use brushes in the future because I don't know, blue and brushes just really upset me. So I use my little silicon tool. I don't know if I didn't fall will help you or not. Basically, you're gonna just want to go ahead and spread the glue around on the inside of the bezel just to kind of get a little better coverage so that it'll all squeezed out to all of the edges properly, basically to ensure your pieces are gonna get nice and stuck together. Once you are satisfied with your glute coverage, you're just going to go ahead and place your cabbage Sean's in the bezel and be sure you line it up properly with the bail at the top. And you're going to want to go ahead and press down nice and hard. Be sure you get a nice, good Squeeze of glue in there. If you've done it well, you shouldn't have much glue pop up. There was a little bit on the edge of this, but this glue will dry clear, so I'm not too concerned about that little blob of glue right at the edge of the bezel because it will not be visible and it'll just help it stay in there. I'm gonna go ahead and show you me setting one more because this one actually did have a little extra glue come out. So I can talk about what to do about that. So again, center it nicely, so everything's nice with your bill and give it a good Squeeze. And I think you can already see that there is a significant amount of glue popping out on the left-hand side there. Now, because this glue is water-soluble, all you need to do is take a little bit of a paper towel, dampen the paper towel, and then just dab the edge of where the glue is gently and just wipe that glue off. It just it doesn't need to be really wet. Just a nice little bit of dampness there and you can just wipe it right off. It's like nothing ever happened. Okay, so you're gonna go ahead and set these aside to dry. And this is pretty much the end of the class. You should now have a bunch of little awesome pendants that is a really nice, wearable art that you can give as gifts or you can sell or keep for yourself. I hope you enjoyed this little easy weekend art class, and I look forward to seeing you again in my other classes. And as always, thank you and have a great day. Bye-bye.