Mermaids complete

Aren’t weekends and holidays wonderful?! So much more time in the day to work on art than the usual workweek grind. Today I finished the Mermaid page and was able to admire it in the sun – I’m loving this silver and gold acrylic paint!

But first, some close-ups of Gypsy’s page in the sun – trying to pick up on the cool effects of the gold and silver paint.

OK – now the mermaid page. These gals have a lot going on.

The background I showed you yesterday was basically made of these mermaid tail designs, using metallic paint to accentuate. I think I have a tendency right now to make my background so noticeable that anything attached to the foreground has to compete. The Gypsy Rose Lee page was supposed to feature an articulated dancer, but it got so interesting with the corset shapes that I decided to leave the dancer for another page.

And on the Mermaid page, the original tails in the background are almost too much for the mermaids trying to swim around on top of them. But I used a black pen to accentuate their arms and torso, which helped. I also used the silver acrylic paint to highlight the edges of the mermaids. It was less successful than the cream colored paint I used to highlight the corsets on the Gypsy page, but it’s still interesting when you move it around in the sunlight.

From the upper left of the page, here’s the first mermaid. She seem serious and disgruntled. I’m not sure why…the reason is off the page to the left. These arm templates (created from scratch) ended up looking like Incredible Hulk arms sometimes, which I found amusing.

Upper right corner: She’s obviously way too cool for mermaid school. Plus she’s obviously spending a lot of time at the mermaid gym around the corner (I mean, look at those arms!). The future’s so bright (underwater), she has to wear shades.

Turns out this gal is actually a US Olympic swimmer (shame on me for not getting her name before I cut her picture out of a magazine – sorry ’bout that!). She posed like this in a bathing suit (of course) at the exact same scale as my tiny mermaid tails – YAHOO! She looks pretty bad-ass and I love her (I didn’t even plan that thing with her hands exactly on the mermaid hips – sometimes art just happens. 🙂

She’s the most genuinely joyous mermaid on the page and I appreciate her joie de vivre.

Bottom right corner is this gal. She’s beefy and beautiful, and I don’t think she’s happy with the gal to her right. She seems rip-raring for a fight.

And here’s happy-go-lucky Hulk Arms in the bottom right. I think she might be saying, “And th..th…th…that’s all folks!”

I hung my pine needle creation in the dining room (it’s the only nail in the house basically, so I use it to highlight my latest artistic find. I’ve spackle-ed too many holes in too many walls to make more in my home…it’s kind of a problem. I’ve actually spent hundreds to frame crochet pieces that are now in storage. It’s stressful to make holes in the wall y’all!).

Wow – now isn’t that a close-up? I guess I’m still learning about this wordpress interface and my camera – how does one get something to show up this close all the time?

I decided to call this piece: God’s Eye (with a nod to the God’s Eye patterns many of us have made of yarn and a wooden cross). You can definitely see in this close-up where all my connection points are. I chose to use the brown thread for all of them and used less as I moved top to bottom in the pattern. Connecting the crochet patterns with threads of the same color would obviously render different results. I’ll probably try that soon.

Here’s some more close-ups:

I’m learning some cool new techniques and enjoying this three-day weekend!

 

Advertisement