Hello! It is technically the "summer" and I have an assignment to create a death artifact for a deceased character. I've dug deep into my childhood to find Ember McLain from the Nickelodeon animated series 'Danny Phantom'. She passed away as a teenage aspiring musician in the early 1970s in Amity Park America. So I thought it'd be cool to mash up the American 1970's early punk era with the formal memorial diamond/jewellery death artifact.
I came up with some sketches after researching the different types of diamond cuttings and earring designs I could go with. Since Ember wore a purple dual earlobe set throughout the show, I thought I'd also create a memorial earring set that follows that theme. Following her colour palette of blue, purple, black, and grey, I ended up choosing the blue memorial diamond option since it was better than the black synthetic gem for a family memorial piece. Then I paired it with silver for the rest of the earring design since it's a classic material they use and it matches her silver accessories.
I ended up choosing the hexagon barbell stud because it seemed to match the flame ear cuff design better than the round-based stud. Then in the flat flame design, I included a letter "E" by the ear to resemble her aspiring music career before her death; because 'we would have loved her hear what she could have created'. It became a more modern contemporary take on the traditional memorial jewellery that is available for families today, because of the punk/edgier style I chose to design it in.
I created an illustrator drawing for the flame design then imported it into Rhino, a new discovery that we could import Ai files as curves. Then I extruded the design before flowing it along a curve I created onto the ear. It took a few attempts to change the initial curve so that the flames would flow nicely without stabbing into the ear model. It was definitely a struggle to figure out how to flow it in the right direction with the diamond pieces on the extrusion, so I had to put them on separately in the final version.
Overall figuring out how to angle everything was pretty hard to do because it had to match the ear model nicely without looking weird. Also trying to make sure the posts on both earring pieces were long enough to stick out through the earlobe was hard to measure at first. Because this model had a wider earlobe than I had intended when I measured out my own earring ratios. Along with scaling the diamonds so that it wouldn't appear too overwhelming was interesting, even the smallest scale difference made the earring purpose seem different. And I hadn't noticed that until I did some research into how earrings affect a person's personality is communicated, and how it makes them appear more shy versus more attention-seeking.
Check out part two of this blog post for final renders and final comments!
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CREDIT:
Ear Model Used: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2948466
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