Revisiting Janus, a Perfect Juxtaposition

First posted on August 7th, 2011 in this blog, the ongoing Janus project has developed a life of its own as one of the most popular designs I offer. The Janus charm featured in the movie The Tourist with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie was the original inspiration for this project.  I haven’t kept the best records going back that far so I don’t have exacting info but my version of the Janus design has shipped to many far-flung locations in Europe, Asia and Australia over the past few years!
Since I elaborate on the development of the design in that 2011 post, I won’t do it again here. If you haven’t seen that post and are interested, you can use the blog’s search feature using “coupla” as a search term and get right to it.
Earlier this month I got a call from Cathryn Feely (name used with her permission) in Southern California asking about the possibility of a two-toned version of the Janus pendant/charm. This is something I had thought about before but had not yet implemented. This is the story about that implementation and it is a perfect example of the juxtaposition of old and new technologies…the idea of “appropriate technology” being one of my current focus points.

In working with Cathryn, the first step was to do a concept rendering. For this I imported an existing photo of the pendant in Sterling Silver into Rhinoceros, my 3D design application and simply superimposed a circle of yellow beads around the perimeter.
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We agreed that it looked pretty cool so far! We then proceeded to discuss the idea of also making the connection jump-ring and bail gold. Using a fantastic little (and free) application called Zsurf I was able to create a hightfield-difference surface of the Janus image and use that instead of the photo to create the rendering above.

Then, by trimming an injection-wax version of my original Janus
carving, and printing the bead ring with bail connector on my trusty B9Creator®, I was able to show Cathryn a live version of our progress.
Upon receiving Cathryn’s enthusiastic go-ahead, I cast the two components separately, the trimmed Janus faces in Platinaire® (a Sterling Silver alloy containing 5% Platinum) and bead ring and bail in a warm-toned 14K yellow gold. Mating the two with a laser tack-weld to insure perfect alignment and then soldering with silver solder resulted in this finished piece!

This two-toned Janus is now part of my ongoing offering and can be found here on the Gary Dawson Jewelry Design website. Juxtaposition isn’t only one of my favorite words, it can be a useful way to think about design.  Maybe when it comes down to it, it *is* design!