Original pinning

 Began to work on my next jewelry piece again. I want it to be a kinetic piece that would be a ferris wheel that would actually rotate. The problem that I ran into last semester and for the first trial today was that the steel pins would become soldered or attached to the brass rod of the rail and the brass would not be soldered to the piece of copper tubing.

Soldered pins to brass piece

 However, I realized that I had been pinning the brass pieces wrong. I had pinned them at the bottom, and learned that if I pinned them at the top, I wouldn't have the trouble with the pins being soldered to the brass, and the solder itself would be easier to maneuver, and the torches flame would be easier to reach the joint.

Second pinning

Piece with newly soldered brass rods

As can be seen, the brass piece soldered so much easier to the copper tubing.

To reintroduce myself, my name is Gretchen Burns and I am currently a student at Pittsburg State University. I'm a double major in biology with an emphasis in field biology and environment and art with an emphasis in jewelry design. Even though I am emphasizing in jewelry design, my goal in life is to attend an American Medical Association accredited school and obtain a Master's degree in Medical and Biological Illustration and continue on in a career of emphasis.

Currently, my work ranges all over the board, as I take new classes and experiment with new techniques and methods to drawing, inking, painting, and jewelry design. Hopefully, my work in the future will be illustrations that are featured in medical and biological journals, magazines, textbooks, etc. I'm hoping to learn how to make my art and illustrations more available toward other venues, but at the moment, I have not yet learned those.

As common as this sounds, I look to Leonardo da Vinci's illustrations from his journals for inspiration on illustration. He was extremely curious about how things worked, moved and changed and studied them. He kept notebooks and sketched everything out, in turn, teaching himself to become a better artist.

A goal of mine is to familiarize myself with more illustrators so I can learn different styles and techniques to perfect my own and find what I am comfortable with.

Shooting

Worked on shooting work professionally. The first attempt at 3-D work turned out pretty good with the light diffusers. The second time wasn't as great. There was a dull yellow light. I'll have to reshoot those and make sure is a nice white light.