Blue whale necklace, sketch to finished piece

Never throw old sketch books and drawings away! I came across a treasure trove of 8 year old sketches the other day, including the little whale on the left. I've been thinking about doing a whale so the timing was perfect! I don't have a scanner so I took a photo of the drawing and then opened it up in Adobe Illustrator. I traced it and worked out the shape so it would work as a pendant. Since precious metal clay shrinks 12%-15%, I use Illustrator to figure out what the size should be to start with to get the finished size I want. All I do is get the drawing the size I want my piece to be, and then scale it up 113%. I then use that as my template. It's a very accurate way to work with the shrinkage inherent to all metal clays.