Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Follow Up From Music Video Beadmaking

I wanted to show you my little girl from the Blind Melon video, "No Rain" , which I posted about on October 30th.

She was a little harder to make than I had guessed and this is my second attempt.  

When working in sculptural glass, it's always important to choose the order of sculpting and adding glass to manipulate it.  The most delicate usually goes last, so there's less chance of it cracking.

As you can see, the  bee antennae are pretty delicate and would chill easily.  Then there are the ruffles that will get cool , because they're kind of thin.

But the part that I hadn't thought as clearly about were her glasses, which are so important to the bead.  In the video, the glasses are as much a focus as her costume.

These I premade out of copper wire.  And the ends needed to be tucked under her hair.  So they went on pretty early.  And as my beadmaking readers know, copper melts pretty easily.   On my first bead,  a few flakes of the copper glasses came off on her face and the glasses had a small piece that was melted out of them.  

I had to add her eyeballs after the glasses  and of course her face needed to be warm enough to receive the tiny stringer I was using.  Good lessons learned and now I have my original Bee Girl in my bead box without glasses, with a clean face and so very cute. (A little facial surgery as well as Laskik was performed.)   Still deciding what to do with her next.  I'm rather fond of her.  For more views of this custom order, visit her in my Etsy shop.

ps...and her photo background was one of my experiments gone bad.  Do NOT use white paper towels thinking they'll add a nice "texture" to the photo!

4 comments:

  1. Marcy, I think she's adorable and lucky is the person who buys her!
    I like the texture. What brand of paper towels do you use?

    ReplyDelete
  2. That is just adorable. It would have taken me at least 25 attempts to get it even half as good as that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Terrific sculpting, Marcy! I think it's great that you've described the importance of figuring out the order to apply these sculpted details...it adds a degree of difficulty to sculpting that we don't realize until we actually sit down to torch something like it :) Yes, I am tooting your horn for you-- YOU ROCK THE GLASS, WOMAN!

    ReplyDelete
  4. All I can say is that I have had that song going around in my head all day! lol That girl was so me at school! 'Cept the bead is waaaaay cute!

    ReplyDelete

Hey, thanks for commenting. Visit my etsy shop, seller name: StudioMarcy