It is such a wonderful thing to work with new materials in new ways! Today my dear friend Lea and I worked together on lesson number two of the Online Series of 5 Classes by the amazing Marilyn Radzat!!! What fun we had! We had previously cut and painted our tiny little egg-gourds last week (see Lea's Blog for more details on Lesson 1).
After an intense hour of cutting tiny little squares of red mirrored glass we layered 'Epoxy-Sculpt', a new medium to me, on the outside of the gourds and then embellished them with the red glass bits and charms, following with a liberal sprinkling of teeny tiny (hole-less) beads in gold and black. No easy task, as these little beads have a mind of their own, and want to go EVERYWHERE!!! See photo of Lea deftly applying beads to her ladybug edges...
Interestingly Lea and I chose different colored tiny beads and gold paint, so our bugs look very different. Lea's gold beads were a little larger then mine, which gave them a super-tactile look, and her gold color a little brighter.
My Itsy-bitsy beads were darker in color but much smaller, (we used both gold and black beads on the base) which gave an entirely different look!
As wonderful as it is to work on Marilyns project, what I really want to do is incorporate these techniques into my own work. Needless to say, I had a tiny bit of Epoxy-Sculpt left over, and decided to wrap it around one of my Halloween Reliquaries! Then came the fun of dipping it into the tiny beads. I am really excited about the result - and my mind is spinning with possibilities! It gives a wonderful 'cave' like feeling, that is a cave "encrusted with jewels and gemstones..." I am thinking - what else can I dip into this??? sand? lavender? spices? glitter? mica? Oh the possibilities....