Brent Neale Winston, the founder and designer of Brent Neale, a fine jewelry brand in New York, posted an image on Instagram last fall to show off a custom project: an 18-karat gold heart pendant based on a drawing by a 9-year-old, commissioned by an uncle for the child’s mother.
“I threw it up on Stories and got all this crazy feedback from people asking if I could do anything,” Ms. Winston said. “That’s when I got the chicken.”
The fowl in question was a colorful, eccentric-looking creation of multicolor feathers and pink-painted paper, perched on legs fashioned from black pipe cleaners. The mother who had sent a photo of it wanted Ms. Winston to re-create her daughter’s preschool art project as a piece of fine jewelry.
“It was so beautiful, but how do we capture the colors and the feathers and all the different art supplies?” the designer recalled thinking.
