This is the first sketch I did for the prompt Natureverse, and I immediately knew I wanted to make this piece.

At first I was nervous to commit to sculpting detailed clouds and swirls so I started rolling up and squashing some sculpting wax into long flat organic shapes, then I just layered them to create volume.

I ended up ditching the brown sculpting wax because I just wasnt getting the form I wanted.

Here is a comparison between the brown and blue wax. You can see how I was able to convey a lot more complexity with the blue wax.

 actually used the original sketch as a reference because I had drawn it 1 to 1 scale, which proved quite help

I decided to get rid of the cartoonish star shape in the center as I thought it was bringing in a sense of style that conflicted with the rest of the form.

These are all of the different wax parts, the smaller pair is cast in silver while the larger part is in bronze.

Joining the pieces that would be made of the same material as to better construct how the form would look while finished.

The two pieces then interlock where they can later be soldered together.

I'm not sure what happened because I'm pretty sure I measured my casting grain correctly, but for some reason the casting got just a tiny bit cut off towards the right. I was able to work through it however, and it didn't really end up impacting the piece too much.

After some cleanup I used the laser welder to tack weld prong settings to be reinforced with solder.

Here is how I soldered them, some holes I could jam some solder inside but for others I had to just wrap it around and hope that it worked. It did, too.

Here are all the prongs and cast pieces soldered together

And here it is with the stones set and a chain attached!

This was actually my first successful prong setting ever, so I'm very happy it turned out how it did. I fully expected some major setback to prevent me from finishing, but most everything went quite smoothly!