Art Bead Scene: August 2017

This month's Art Bead Scene challenge inspiration is an illustration from a book called Twelve Dancing Princesses and Other Fairy Tales.  As a children's librarian and long time fan of fairy tales, this choice made my little heart happy!  The artwork is from the collection's title story and was painted by Kay Nielsen.  You can read more about the artwork and the artist HERE. 

Twelve Princesses on the Way to the Dance

Kay Nielsen

Published in 1923

Watercolor and ink

I was inspired by the colors of this illustration as well as the leaves of the impossibly tall and skinny trees.  I chose an oversized ceramic pendant by my friend Tracee Dock of The Classic Bead as my focal.  The colors were just perfect and I thought the patterns in the clay echoed the leaves and, to some extent, the flowers on the princesses' gowns.

The large hole in the pendant cried out for some sort of fiber to run through it and I decided on some brown deerskin lace (does anyone know why it's called that??).  I sewed the leather to brass jump rings with maroon waxed Irish linen.  Since the pendant has a rustic, almost crusty feel to it, I added in some matte red creek jasper in two different shapes as well as some crazy horse jasper rounds that weren't too shiny.  Red creek jasper is one of my favorite stones because of all of it's rich colors... using it here was an easy way to pick up some of the other colors from the artwork. 

P.S.  This is the project that I should have been working on when I was "productive procrastinating" with my giraffe necklace last week!  :)