Art Bead Scene: January 2017

This month's inspiration for the Art Bead Scene challenge is Field of Flowers by Egon Schiele.  I'm just loving the burst of much needed color... it has been bitterly cold in Minnesota and spring is still a distant, fuzzy dream here.  I love how the chalk gives the jumble of flowers a bit of a blurry and almost childlike look.  Oranges and rusty reds dominate the color palette but there's also plenty of cream, gold, and pops of greens... plenty to be inspired by!  Since art historian I am not, you can read more about the art and artist on the ABS blog HERE.

 Field of Flowers

Egon Schiele

1910

Chalk on Paper

I had less in my bead stash than expected to work with the colors of the artwork but, luckily, I did have an amazing hollow lampwork glass bead by Mary Ila Duntemann that was just perfect!  Here is what I originally pulled together for this challenge:

When I first started, I thought I would make a long necklace with fun flower beads in shades of orange and dark red.  I began making wire wrapped links with the hibiscus style flowers but the more I thought about it, the more worried I became about that lampwork bead getting knocked around and possibly damaged.  If I had been making it for myself, I probably would have stuck to the original design since I'm super careful with my jewelry.  But, as I plan to sell this one, I erred on the side of caution and went back to the drawing board!

Plan B involved grabbing some pretty red leather cord and digging through my stash to find a variety of larger holed beads to coordinate with the gorgeous focal.  I'm still trying to decide if I add some copper wire wraps below the knots to further secure the ends and to add another pop of copper... otherwise I would just trim down the cord ends a little more.  I would love to hear your thoughts on that!

Now, since I had already made most of the wrapped bead links for the original design, I was determined not to let those go to waste... so a second design was born!  I picked up a pretty poppy bead by Heather Powers of Humblebeads in a bargain bundle a while back that worked nicely with my little Czech glass flowers.  It's a pretty simple design that showcases the dominant colors from the artwork.  It's tough to tell, but the tiny glass beads on either side of the orange flowers actually have a little bit of green in them.

Thanks for stopping by to see what I've been up to lately.  I took a bit of a beading break during the holidays so it felt really great to get these two necklaces finished and dive back into creation mode.  I've got lots to catch up on so I'd better get back to my bead table!!