Mia is Here!
This was a really exciting project I was lucky to take part in. Nicola Madill a local singer songwriter wrote a fantastic song Mia about the underworld life of mermaids! I was asked to take part this in project on two levels...
First up as the Jewellery designer for the mermaids as Mia the Queen of the Underworld and her mermaids loved everything covered in jewels and pearls! This excited me a lot as I would get to design and make some jewellery that I might not usually get to make!
Secondly - Be a Mermaid!!! More on that later
The mermaids had two set colours Mia (me) being Gold and Red & Nixy (Nicola) Silver and Blue.
This gave me a starting point with my designs I wanted to make head pieces to embellish the mermaids and of course have rings and hand jewellery.
I decided to mainly work in silver, gold plating the pieces for Mia and keeping Nixys Silver and using precious gemstones - Red Garnets for Mia and Blue Topaz for Nixy.
This was the beginning of a hand piece I made using silver wire structure with garnets set into the metal which was then gold plated and I used pearls and chain to attach it around the finger.
For Mia I wanted her jewellery to be very grand as she is Queen of the Underworld. I used gold plated Bling Rings, with garnets and cubic zirconia to stack up the fingers with my gold plated textured stack rings and made a gold plated and garnet T bar Ring to reflect her power.
With Nixys jewellery her rings hand jewellery was a little more muted to show the difference between her and Mia, I again stacked up Silver and Topaz Bling Rings, T Bars and silver looped rings to embellish her fingers.
At the beginning of designing costumes for the mermaids we thought it would be good to have some jewelled themed bralets/tops. I worked with loads and loads of metres of chain to make this bra below, but sadly the issue is when wearing clothes like this underwater it didn't cover what we needed to have covered!! Luckily Steph our Art director managed to find this coin bra that worked perfectly when sprayed gold for Mias outfit! 
I loved making the head pieces for this project and another learning curve in this project was to see how the jewellery moved under water, this first head piece had a row of pearls, this ended up looking like minnie ears when I swam underwater so it was decided to just go for the gold, garnet and chain designs.
Working with Jillian Elizabeth the make up artist, we managed to use make up and jewels to enhance the pieces of jewellery adorning the skin as well as the jewellery being worn.
For Nixys Head piece I used swarovski blue crystals, silver chain and a piece of my silver jewellery featuring a topaz (usually a necklace) to make the feature point of the head piece.
The final look of the mermaids looked unreal and really worked well underwater, The hair and make up, the clothing, tattoos and jewellery all helped to create this magical look for the mermaids!
We had a fantastic team working on Mia showcasing a lot of Dundee's talents. It was filmed by underwater film specialist Lindsay Brown from Stray Seal and film makers Flyboy Original, film editor and visual effects specialist Matt Cameron. The incredible make up was by Jillian Elizabeth. Art Director Steph Johnstone worked on the outfits (which was a lot of work getting the perfect tails and tops for us mermaids!) The impressive Hair by Liam Hansen. Jewellery made by me and Must say a massive shout out to Vilqua Van Cartier for working on a lot of the film responsibilities and training myself and Nicola to become Mermaids! My next blog will let you know about the life of training to become a mermaid - training to swim, act, speak and see underwater! Which was a challenge for me being scared of deep water! :D
