My first ever piece of piercing art

I have always been hesitant to jump into the next step in my career.  I always feel like I haven't earned it or I'm not ready.  It took me a year of researching and practicing on friends before I started doing surface anchors.  Before I even took that step I desperately wanted to venture into doing play piercing.  I tried to get my mentor J.D. to do some pieces with me so I could have back up but he was never really interested.  Finally my hubby Fernando gave me a huge push! In fact it was a push for myself and two of my closest friends at the time to get our art out there.  We planned to put together an art show <3 Originally I was just supposed to do a live performance but I didn't feel comfortable having the first play piercing piece I did be in front of an audience.  I then decided to do a series and have photographs of them as part of the actual exhibit.  I love corset piercing which are the usual first step for most but I thought they would be too predictable.  My goal became to create pieces that adorned the body so beautifully that they almost make you forget there are 8+ piercing holding everything in place.  

My first model was the lovely Jennifer Pierre who was the manager at the shop where I worked at the time.  She is actually the female voice of an amazing band called Askultura which you should definitely check out.  Inspired by the lovely beehive she made with her knee-length dreads I wanted to do something that looked classic.  I decided to make her a very unique set of pearl necklaces <3 I also made the feather hair piece and added to pearls to match.  I am forever thankful for her trusting me to do this for my first time on her.  I sterilized everything I would need at the shop and brought it all home so I could take my time.  

Running on cuban time she showed up quite late in the night.  My "photographer" also was unable to acquire any kind of proper camera so we ended up using my little digital kodak camera.  I covered all of my work space in saran wrap to make sure nothing would get contaminated and laid my bibs on top.  I had made a stencil for this because I was so nervous about it being perfect.  The piercing process actually went super smoothly, her skin was nice and stretchy so it was not too bad for her either.  She was a total trooper!  After all the rings were in place it came time to close them up.  I went to close the first ring and after a little bit of pressure "click" it came out of place.  This had never happened to me I had no idea what was going on.  I looked at the groove inside the ring closing plier and realized I brought the wrong one home O.O The one I brought home was made for very small rings and the ones I put in Jen were 1/2".  I felt like the biggest dummy ever! Closing up these rings then became a very looooong process.  I had to hold the rings with my fingers and little by little try to close them up so I wouldn't hurt Jen.  My "photographer" ended up going home because she had completely fallen asleep on the couch waiting for me to finish.  She took a couple of pictures of the process but it took hours to get all the rings closed up.  I ended up not even using the balls that were meant for the rings and using some of the pearls I had instead so I could leave them a bit more open.  This actually ended up looking really nice ^.^ 

When all was said and done I was extremely proud.  I even took all the pictures of the piece myself way before I had any kind of photography training and I was very happy with the outcome.  This ended up being the first piece I ever had featured on ModBlog.  It is also the piece that had the nicest and longest blurb attached with the photos <3 All in all, despite things not going ideally, I love this piece.  Check out the feature on ModBlog titled The Surface of a Pearl ^.^

Absolutely love this photo of Jen and her big beautiful smile <3 <3 <3