Extended Practice

Nails
We both agreed that Izzie is going to need some amazing nails for the shoot as there will be a lot of close ups on her hands to show off the rings and hand harnesses etc. We bought some cheap fake nails in town to paint ourselves, but then I came across a girl on Instagram who hand paints nails to sell which are amazing!

So I sent Anouska a direct message via Instagram to see if she would be up for painting us some custom nails and how much they would cost. We exchanged a lot of messages talking about the brand and what kind of things she could do and have agreed on a price for the set. She is currently in the process of creating the nails, but in the mean time we had to measure Izzie's nail width so that we could make sure that they were the right size!


Anouska sent me an email with a photo attached to show how to measure the nails as I measured them completely wrong the first time.



I remeasured Izzie's nails this way and the measurements definitely seemed a lot more realistic!









I'm really excited to see how these come along. I originally gave her a lot of ideas to go with that would suit the brand, so hopefully she creates some perfect nails for us!

Moon Prop
We both really want some moon props to use in the shoot and in the product shots, so we created some out of wood using the laser cutter, which was the first time I'd actually used the laser cutter!!




We cut the moons out of 3mm MDF at a variety of sizes, with one large moon.


For some reason the laser cutter seemed to have a mind of it's own, even when you made sure all the measurements were correct, but luckily the moon just about fit into the wood.




The smaller moons came out pretty well too! A couple were a little bit dodgy, but that's why we thought it was best to cut out as many as possibly so that we had room for error!


We even used the laser cutter to cut out some pillow boxes on some pearlescent lilac paper (these photos don't do the paper any justice) and used the kiss cut option to create folds in the paper to make them easier to construct.


For labels on the necklaces we cut out some long thin labels in the same paper, and we thought that using the moon for the hole to put string through or necklace chains was a lot more exciting than using a hole punched piece of paper.


Had a look in the print room to see if they had holographic foil, but we're not entirely sure if we could foil things that easily because of already cutting out packaging etc. But it was definitely worth looking at to know about!

When we went into town a few days ago we visited a spray paint shop to see what they had in stock for spraying our wooden moon props. We decided to work with silver or metallic colours instead of holographic as we found that finding holographic materials was really difficult! The spray paint we bought is a silver chrome, so we quickly tested it out on two of the little moons to see how it looks..


We decided to try out spray painting straight onto the moon as well as spray painting over a layer of emulsion which was suggested by the man at the spray painting shop. The moon on the left doesn't have any emulsion on it and the moon on the right has a thin layer of emulsion. Although the emulsion does help to make the chrome look more shiny and bold, we preferred the mottled effect that you get from spraying straight onto the wood, plus the spray paint picked up any brush strokes or imperfections in the emulsion which was easily avoided by not using it at all!

I took the moons home with me and spray painted them all in the garden.









Product Shot Props
http://www.globalcrystals.co.uk
We paid a visit to Global Tribe Crystals in town to see if we could get anything for our in studio product shots. There were so many crystals there, we thought that we could always take a trip back closer to the time if we need anything to use in the photos, rather than going crazy and buying things straight away that we may not need!



We found some really pretty pearlescent shells which we thought we could use almost as a bowl to place some of the jewellery inside for photographs.