Friday, May 21, 2010

Butterfly Girl


Spring is here!

You should see my backyard, it's teaming with life, bees, hummingbirds, butterflies of many colors.

It's amazing. The roses are blooming, the tomatoes are planted and it's my little oasis. So inspiring, in fact, that I abandoned all of my nearly completed pieces to take on a whole new project- oh about 2 weeks before my Vegas show. New stacking rings just had to take a back burner for a day- the butterfly must be set free! It must!

I've always been a butterfly girl at heart- ask my mom and my sis. It has made present shopping for me soooo easy- if it has a butterfly on it, it's perfect. What can I say, I'm easy.

I was struck by the beauty of the monarchs in my backyard this past week. (I mean, come on, how can you not love a butterfly in flight?) We normally don't get too many of those, but this week it's been glorious. Incredible how they dance from blossom to blossom, warming their wings in the sun. I had to do yet another butterfly inspired piece. It was imperative.

First I did a sketch of an entire butterfly, but I have whole butterflies... what about a single wing?

So I traced only the wing with my trusty "dripper" and set about making my new pendant. A quick wax lesson: I place the clear sheet wax over my drawing and trace the lines with the "dripper". Carving away any excess wax from the wax sheet. My original intent was to have the lines raised, the background recessed thus grabbing the oxidization.

But then I realized that I had a few solid butterfly designs and it might be nice to have something open and airy. Free, if you will. :)


So I cut out the white sheet wax leaving an outline of what's normally the black of the butterfly wing. Can you tell that the white sheet wax has been carved away? A tedious process, but necessary to achieve my desired pendant.

Then I thought...Hmm... the black of the butterfly wing? Maybe it'll be blackened with some sparkly diamonds or white with rubies? Augh! Too band I don't have a pic of that yet.

Patience, grasshopper. Or shall I say "Patience, Butterfly".

Peace, Namaste and happy spring to all!

7 comments:

  1. You are sooo good. That's lovely. And I do think you could stand to do a new size full flutterby. How long did that take from start to finish? I can dream.

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  2. Great post! a n incite into the creative mind!

    when will this new piece be available?


    thanks for sharing, your garden sounds magical

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  3. This is really fascinating and beautiful. Please keep posting as it continues to take form!

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  4. Can't wait to see the final piece. It looks so gorgeous already

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  5. Lora- total zone & total focus on this piece. So I would say I started drawing Thursday morning- dripped/carved for about 6 hours. Then did maybe three more hours of clean up the next day. So 9 hours of carving, which is really good for me. I am normally very very scattered, I jump from project to project, get halfway into something, get distracted and pick up another project. I think I'm going to work on a smaller version next.

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  6. Henry- I'll keep you posted. it now needs to be cast downtown, I'll go clean it up, make sure it came out well and then have it molded, then castings are made from the mold. That process will take anywhere from 2-4 weeks, depending on how slow my caster is with doing the mold, they always drag their feet on the mold.

    What's really fun is that I get some wax shots done and I can manipulate those into smaller pieces, rings, etc... I'll post more about that when I start to do it.

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  7. Seriously gorgeous. I cannot wait to see the finished product!

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