Collaborations Part III

http://www.etsy.com/listing/46172011/beaded-jellyfish-bottle-cap-necklace

 

I had tremendous fun hunting examples of collaborations and knew I'd have just as much fun creating a couple of my own.  While working on my bottle cap series, I fell in love with the miniature paintings Karyn, Somewhathip, created on her bottle caps and knew they'd be the perfect first venture to combine talents.  I contacted her for permission to utilize her cap in my own creation and then bought two of her pendants in my favorite design, the Jellyfish.

What I most appreciate about Karyn's work, besides the gorgeous artwork, is you can tell it's a bottle cap.  Although my designs preserve the cap's graphic artwork, you can't readily tell it's made from a cap.  I hesitated before beading around the image and taking that aspect away from her pendant.  However, I decided to take the plunge and focus on the painting and not the bottle cap.


Painting and drawing are talents I truly wish I had.  I can paint the Donna Dewberry one-stroke method (she can teach anyone to paint with the right brushes).  However, this is a technique not true artistry in my incapable hands (although I did create very cute paintings in my daughters bedroom thanks to Donna).  I'm not any better at graphic design or collage work.  I lack the depth perception, color vision, or art gene that it takes to make something beautiful in these areas.  


Karyn's artwork was a perfect match.  She utilizes bottle caps, my favorite "cabochon", and her paintings are vibrantly beautiful and could hold their own with the beading.  I wanted to experiment with fringe and decided to mimic the jellyfish tentacles.  I found the perfect german glass beads on Laura McCabe's ebay store, highendbeads, in half moon shapes in oranges and red.  These were added the the bottom of the branch fringe along with Japanese drops for additional color.  I also included Japanese drops around the perimeter of the cap to fill in the fullness created by the cap's depth.  In my own designs I usually flatten the cap first for a more narrow profile.  The thicker profile created a bit of a challenge as I was at risk of overpowering the painting but needed to fill in the area.

The result was highly dramatic and it needed a necklace strap that was bold, but would also pull back a bit so that the painting did not become lost.  (A danger in beadwork is to add too much to the design).  I went back to my favorite rope, the spiral, and added a second row of embellishment to create fullness.  The result, I believe, is beautiful and pulls the predominant blue of Karyn's design back into the design.  

I have a couple of other ventures in the pipeline.  The first utilizes a graphic button from one of my favorite button artists, Jill from Barrel of Monkeys.  I've purchased several of her buttons as gifts and own several others from my travels.  I think this button will be my first one, it's her signature design and I can envision something wonderful for it.  This collaboration combines my love for using found objects (who doesn't own a button), buying local, and combining skills.

Stay tuned for some follow-up interviews and notes from my most recent classes (just have to finish the projects first).  I leave you for now with a Jellyfish treasury to enjoy.  When I release a new design, I often create a treasury based on the same theme.  I'm proud to say that this was chosen to appear on Etsy's front page recently.