Thursday's art

You may remember that I've been working on an art bead for a Flickr group challenge. This month's inspiration comes from Van Gogh's beautiful "Almond Branches".



My initial thought was to make a landscape cane with the entire image formed into the cane. This proved much more difficult to execute than I expected and looking back, I think that I should have used an inlay technique instead. In any event, this is what I ended up with...


I tried to duplicate the look of hand painted porcelain by adding some extra accents to the branches with various pens and paints and after curing, I coated the pendant with a product called Faux Dichro Liquid Glass which gave it a lovely glazed ceramic look.

Much to my delight, the current assignment for Art Beads. com's Beaders that Blog program is Spring. We were told to pick anything from the catalog that made us think of spring. I thought that it would be fun to combine the challenges and decided on blue jasper calsilica coin beads as a complement for the Almond Blossom piece. I mean after all, what says spring better than the beautiful blues and woodsy browns that are in these jasper beads. The beads that I received are so gorgeous, that they almost outshine the focal bead that I made. I'm thinking of also using them in a multi-strand necklace. I've very happy with them. To complete the design, I made some accent beads to match and I decided on light yellow seed beads as spacers.

These challenges just might be the motivation that I needed to get out of my slump. When working on a design, I'm not usually very dreamy or poetic. The beads I chose are calsilica, actually a man-made amalgamation of various minerals and stone fragments that are held together with resin. While working with these beads and the polymer clay, I did stop to contemplate the many ways of combining natural elements with man made products. It seemed to make a statement about how we can retain our love of nature and yet use modern technology to enhance art, as well as so many other areas of life.

That's it for now. Hope everyone is enjoying their week and getting ready for the weekend. Take care and stay creative.



*FTC compliance disclosure* the products attributed to Artbeads.com in this post where provided as a promotional gift by Artbeads.com in relation to the blogging program. My comments pertaining to these products are my personal opinion, no compensation has been received.