When I received my October/November 2010 issue of Beadwork, I immediately made one of editor Melinda Barta's buttons in the "Custom Cool" section. Instead of using size 15 beads for the edging, I used teardrop beads, which I really liked. This was an astonishingly quick, fun project. I'll be making more of these buttons in the future.
Learning Large
I was surprised by the small size of the finished button. Magazines often include large photos of projects and this project was no exception. This is great from a learning standpoint—I use photos as much as the written instructions to learn and I love, particularly with seed beads, to be able to see how everything fits together.
Artistic Appeal
From an aesthetic point, however, sometimes large photos work against projects. I've ruled out doing certain projects because the enlarged photos make the pieces look bold and dramatic, which is just not my personal style. I'll never forget how surprised I was when I saw Dustin Wedekind's real-life jewelry samples from Getting Started with Seed Beads. The projects look huge in the book, but the actual examples are quite small and wearable. Books and magazines do tend to publish finished sizes, but sometimes it's hard to reconcile how something will actually look finished just by looking at the numbers.
An Experiment
As an experiment, I decided to set my finished beaded button onto the pages of the Beadwork tutorial in order to compare the size. This photo shows my finished button "life size." It looks like a baby button!
I don't want magazines to replace large photos with small ones, but it would be great to have additional photos which showed scale, particularly for jewelry. At the same time, I realize that the chances of magazines publishing additional photos is practically nil, given the cost of printing pages.
With all the excitement about emags in the publishing world, I'm wondering if anyone has thought about providing helpful content such as "actual size" project photos for jewelry. For me, that's the kind of useful—but perhaps not cool enough—type of info that would be worth the extra price of a digital edition. What do you think?