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I'm a mother, wife, grandmother, daughter, sister, friend. I'm a self-taught potter. I make beads from clay and jewelry from my beads. Follow me on my online journal as I toss around ideas from my life and from my studio.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

July Art Bead Scene Blog Challenge

It's a new month and time for a new challenge over at Art Bead Scene Blog  This time the challenge is based on a sculpture called Blue Feather instead of a painting. I had the perfect pendant already made for this challenge. Perfect color and shape just sitting in my stash waiting for that Ah HAA moment. When I saw the sculpture I had that moment. I also had some pyramid shaped beads I had made that I thought depicted the triangular shaped feathers or birds in the sculpture and some small metallic glazed discs for the round shapes in the sculpture. The only thing I had to do was figure out how to include the blue feather aspect of the sculpture. It would add color and a linear shape to my piece. Then I thought, blue feather. I have a collection of naturally shed feathers that I clean and sometimes dye. I had a dove feather that actually had a blue tint to it so I added a little more blue to it, wrapped it with copper wire that I patinaed and added that to my assymetric Blue Feather Necklace. What do you think?

Pretty cool, right? But if you check out the Art Bead Scene group on Flickr you won't see this necklace. As much as I love it, the natural feather was much too literal an interpretation of the title of the sculpture. The sculpture is so sleek and modern. My little blue feather just softened this piece up too much.

So, on to plan B. I needed something bright blue and sleek. I had some paper beads in a nice bright blue from Bead for Life but they were too small and I needed one long bead. So I made my own paper bead. I had the right color paper and I had been experimenting with resin, so I rolled up my paper, glued the end down and covered my bead with resin and waited...and waited... for it to dry. So now what do you think?

I think this is a much better representation of the sculpture. That paper resin bead is shiny and sleek and really adds that linear quality I needed. Check out the rest of the entries for this month's challenge at Art Bead Scene. Click on the View this month's entries button on their blog.

4 comments:

  1. Hi Cindy! I think the final result is just perfect! What a great idea to make the paper bead. What kind of resin did you use? Was it a 2-part epoxy sort? I'd love to try it...with all my unpacking I've found a whole lot of pretty paper in my stash. Take care!

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  2. I think you're going to make an amazing piece!

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  3. Also, in regards to your comment on my blog (and you can erase this, i just wanted to make sure you saw it>

    That's ok, Cindy (about the BSBP)-- to be honest, that wasn't what this post was about. It was more about beaders who think of so many of us as "little people" or "adoring fans" that don't matter enough to warrant a bit of kindness. After a while, it all catches up. Might take a while, but it does catch up!

    You're fine, Cindy! ((((hugs)))))

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