By high school I had a variety of art classes to choose from and I loved it. I tried out Commercial Art, Photography, Sculpture, Ceramics and Jewelry. I ended up sticking with Jewelry and took a total of five jewelry classes including Advanced Placement where I entered my work in 3-D design. It's very funny to me that enjoy making jewelry when I don't really enjoy wearing it, I think it's because of the shiny factor. I really enjoyed found object and lost wax casting and constructing hollow forms.
I did pretty well and my teacher had me enter my work in quite a few art shows, high school shows to international shows. The largest show I was in was Rio Grande's Saul Bell Jewelry Design Competition where I entered my hollow form bracelet in the Emerging Artist's category.
I ended up placing third having the opportunity to attend the award ceremony in Las Vegas, Nevada. I was really fortunate to have the opportunity to meet jewelry magazine editor's and other jewelers, many of them professional jewelers. While I was there I was able to participate in a photo shoot for a Rio Grande ad that was going to be in the Jewelry Artist Magazine.
Now I'm a sophomore at CU Boulder and am trying to experiment with my style so I have been taking sculpture classes. I thought it would be interesting to go from working very small to very large, but while experimenting with this I began missing metalsmithing. I decided to try out jewelry again and am currently interning at Angie Star Jewelry off of Pearl Street and 18th street.
