Paintings

Painting Detail: Snowy scene near a creek.
Medium: Acrylic Paint
Actual Size: 16" x 20"
Painted Date: 12/11/2007

Wallpapers

Here are couple of Wallpaper designs I made long time back for my Favorite Super Sports cars. Yet these two are still in my favorite sportscars...



Info: McLaren F1 Wallpaper Download 1024 x 768px



Info: Pagani Zonda Wallpaper
Download 1024 x 768 px

Jewelry designs

Jewelry designing at FAARO;

Designing a piece of jewelry take lot of work and time put into in to bring a stunning end product. Appearance, Beauty and Elegance all start from the designing of the jewelry piece. As an award winning talented painter, I draw the new design on paper starting the process. (I will look forward to post some of my art work in this blog in the future, so look forward to that)

Once something come across as stunning and amazing design from the paper, I digitalizes the design using sophisticated software like Rhino 3D and Photoshop. (In my previous posts I talked about designing Jewelry using Photoshop.)

Attributing correct and relevant dimensions to the design is also a key component. You dont want a stunning piece of Jewelry to be too bulky or too tiny. It needs to be precisely sized to bring out the beauty in it.

Finally the Jewelry will be made into a dazzling solid piece from the designs and precise dimensions using advance scaling measurements at FAARO Jewelry Manufacturing Facility. (aka Channel Kay)

Jewelry of the Week: 2

This is an elegant 14k White Gold Metal with an astonishing Red Ruby and 6 Pink Sapphire stones. All gems are genuine, if you have followed this blog you know the quality of Gem stones at FAARO.

This gem stone goes well for a dinner party on your black dress or a white dress to bring out the beauty and elegance in you and make you show up with classic Piece of Jewelry.
Please visit the below link and check out more information about this Item.

More information: Click Here

How to design a Jewelry BluePrint in Photoshop

In this Post I am going to talk about designing a blue print for a jewelry prototyp design using Adobe Photoshop.
Skill Level: Advance

Step 1:

Create a new layer and using brush tool draw a basic shape of the design like this. Dont worry about getting it correct. We need a basic structure. Make sure brush size is 2px or less and 100% Opacity

Step 2:

Now reduce the opacity of the layer containing the basic sketch to around 30%. Using "Pen tool" (P) draw an out line along the lines from your sketch. Make sure you select "Path" from top tool bar after you select Pen tool.

Step 3:

You could use "Add anchor tool" under Pen toll menu to shape up the the outline made using the pen tool, so the outline will align with the below sketch you drew earlier.

Step 4:

Now create a new layer. And go to Window>Path and select the layer. Then Choose brush tool (brush size 2px, round brush with fading) and click "Stroke path with Brush" in Path window pane. This will draw a brush line along the outline you just drew using the Pen tool. Now you should be able to see a clear line on the outline of the jewelry design. Just like this draw the outline for the entire design.

Step 5:
Creating Shading and coloring the finished outline.

Make sure you create a new layer to do coloring. So that outline layer will be ontop of the color layer. The new layer selected, using brush tool with desired color paint around the areas like shown in the picture. After that use eraser tool to erasethe colors that went outside the Area and also to reduce Opacity of the coloring. You will require realistic drawing skills to select the right shade of color to paint over the area to give it a 3D dynamic look.



Once everything is done it should look like a professional Blue print of a Prototype design which can be sent to manufacturers....

FAARO Jewelry of the week

Tripple heart Pendant with Genuine Sri Lankan White Sapphire and Garnet.
More information of this piece of jewelry can be found at;
http://store.faaro.com/servlet/Detail?no=47

Sri Lanka as Gem Producing Country

Sri Lanka is renowned for its finest gems from very ancient times. Sri Lanka gems have been pre-eminent internationally and the source books of history record the historical importance of Sri Lanka gems. The availability of historical as well as traditional know-how among jewellery manufacturers in the country have added more luster to the situation.

Sri Lanka’s gem industry has a very long and colorful history. Sri Lanka was affectionately known as Ratna – Dweepa which means Gem Island. The name is a reflection of its natural wealth. Marco Polo in 1292 wrote “I want you to understand that the island of Ceylon is, for its size, the finest island in the world, and from its streams comes rubies, sapphires, topazes, amethyst and garnet”. Ptolemy, the second century astronomer recorded that beryl and sapphire were the mainstay of Sri Lanka’s gem industry. Records from sailors that visited the island states that they brought back “jewels of Serendib”. Serendib was the ancient name given to the island by middle – eastern and Persian traders that crossed the Indian Ocean to trade gems from Sri Lanka to the East during the fourth and fifth century.

Sri Lanka, geologically speaking is an extremely old country. Ninety percent of the rocks of the island are of Precambrian age, 560 million to 2,400 million years ago. The gems form in sedimentary residual gem deposits, eluvial deposits, metamorphic deposits, skarn and calcium-rich rocks. Other gems are of magmatic origin.

Residual deposits are mainly found in flood plains of rivers and streams. The metamorphic types of gems constitute 90% of the gem deposits in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has the highest density of gem deposits compared to its landmass. Ratnapura contains the most gem deposits and derived its name from the gem industry. Ratnapura means “city of gems”.


The blue sapphires from Sri Lanka are known as Ceylon Sapphire. Ceylon Sapphires are reportedly unique in colour, clarity and lustre compared to the blue sapphires from other countries.

Source: Wikipedia, Sri Lanka National Gem & jewlery Authority.

Competitive advantage and Sustainability

Micheal Forter once said to create a sustainability a company should either be a differentiator (produce goods that are heavily different from that of the competitor) or the cost leader. (low cost provider) But with the new online business there created a way for companies to be both differentiator and the low cost provider in different markets which they are not expert in. Which is the niche market.

Online retailing create a huge global consumer base. But not to forget this huge world wide consumer base also create now a global competition from other businesses around the world in the same industry. In this bigger competition it comes to the point how much a company can differentiate themselves or cut costs to create a average or a sustainable competitive advantage.

In my venture at FAARO jewelry we planned to create a competitive advantage over thousand other online jewelry retailers. We get access to gem mines in Sri Lanka, where we cut several middle persons and be able to purchase high quality gem stones from gem mines, specially Blue sapphire gems which FAARO is specialized in. There is no doubt should you have about the quality of the gem stones at FAARO. They are natural and genuine.

This create a great opportunity for FAARO to cut down costs of the gems. (Almost 95% of FAARO jewelry are gemstone jewelry) Low cost of jewelry at FAARO does not imply they are bad in quality, we were able to price them low because of the low cost of precious and genuine gemstones that we have the access to.

This can be classified as a sustainable advantage over the market we operate. But will this last for a long time? We dont know, if it doesnt we will look into other strategies.

Another strategy at FAARO is their unique Crystal Sapphire collection, which I mentioned in my previous post. This is not a propounding advantage at the moment but as we sharpen our customer targeting we can extract some revenue out of this product line.

In a nutshell it is very important to plan out your strategies and then build the business plan around and also the business.

Manufacturing a product from scratch; FAARO manufacturing facility

Setting up a manufacturing plant or a facility to build a product can be tedious at times. More complex the manufacturing process, more expensive the cost of equity required to start up.

FAARO manufacturing facility located in Sri Lanka is still in its improving stages as we keep adding new machines and processes to improve product manufacturing efficiency. Jewelry manufacturing require variety of equipments to build small jewelry to precise dimensions and to grand quality as we always do in FAARO manufacturing plant.

Quality of our jewelry is the key factor that we pay most of the attention to in the manufacturing process. We also stress on the consistency of our jewelry designs.

Workers at FAARO jewelry are well trained to make jewelry to meet international high standards and quality. Jewelry designing and manufacturing is also helped by our design school in Florence Italy. The training we received from this jewelry school has helped us greatly to also use our skills and design attractive jewelry to be made at FAARO manufacturing facility.

After all jewelry made at FAARO manufacturing facility are made by highly skillful workers and they possess best quality, that of a Sapphire gem stone jewelry.

Current Venture - FAARO Jewelry

Little bit about the adventure, currently I have a venture in jewelry business. A jewelry company started in partnership with my uncle, rather a family business as we plan it to be in the long run to a more extreme level. To give time-line of major events occurred at FAARO jewelry so far...


FAARO jewelry was first founded in Japan during an experiment modeling in Rhino software. My grandps used to make jewelry in old days and sell them to big companies but with lack of marketing knowledge he could not improve and capitalize his great jewelry making skills to generate a big revenue. My uncle and I started thinking that jewelry was something that all our relatives has been doing in the past and thought that is a good way to go about using our skills. At first we wanted to use several suppliers from Thailand and Bangkok and sell their jewelry back using more of mobile and online format exclusively in Japan. www.lafaaro.jp , You can also have a look at their latest yahoo online store. (Faaro yahoo store)

As we start gaining some recognition among locals in japan we started thinking about a manufactring facility in Sri Lanka.

Why Sri lanka?
Sri Lanka is a well famous country for its gorgeous blue sapphire gems, as we identified this component earlier on and decided to capitalize on that to generate revenue using FAARO jewelry. We had to take serious measurements on the total quality management aspect of the jewelry that were created in Sri Lanka. Consistency in the designs was one of the problems at first.

2007 December we rented a place and set up FAARO exclusive manufacturing facility near the capital of Sri Lanka. This manufacturing facility, Channel Kay, was supervised by my mom on all the operations.

In January 2008, I started our newest venture of FAARO in US. Operation aspect of the company is well structured at the moment although with proper technology can be improved further.

What makes FAARO different from other jewelry stores?
In Jewlery industry turn over rate of products is very high as they stay on shelves for a long time than grocery items. With our jewelry manufacturing facility in Sri Lanka we get access to genuine gem mines easier than other jewelry companies. We perform gem cutting and installing to eliminate the middle man. Which is a key component in cutting down costs of the final product.
Secondly FAARO is specialized in Blue sapphire and other sapphire jewelry. As we compulsively add new jewelry designs to our collection, we have been able to seperate our collection from other jewelers out there. FAARO Crystal sapphire collection is a great example of how we can dominate the sapphire gems sector of the jewelry industry. (Sapphire Crystal)

Since we started FAARO jewelry we've been adding new designs to please the taste of people in US and Japan. Be sure to check out our US official website www.faaro.com

I will look forward to introducing you to our newest jewelry collections in the future through this blog.

Welcome to Presentom by Ashan

In this blog, plan is to spread my knowledge and what I know in the area of product manufacturing, entrepreneurship, Global business, my new ventures as well as the current venture which is FAARO jewelry (www.faaro.com) I highly plan on introducing FAARO jewelry to the blog community in a more informal setting and to give a touching insight about this venture and its production and also I would like to share some insight on softwares from excel to photoshop, Flash, project management and optimization. You can also expect to read some topics on beauty and natural gemstones, environment and future.

I would greatly appreciate your comments on my future topics and I will also try to create video and audio format topics that could be distributed through podcasting.

From time to time I will have several eBay auctions activating and will also look forward to sharing them with you as some of you might find them interesting.

Thank you.