Color Challenge Finals: The Lady & the Unicorn

 

As promised, here is the first of the five pieces I created for the Margie & Me Finals.

The first piece from which I decided to take my color cues was the tapestry 'The Lady & the Unicorn', with its rich rust, lapis blue, gold and pine green palette. This was immediately a challenge, as I had few rust reds/oranges in my bead collection, but I solved it by thinking beyond beads, instead selecting a carved red agate flower as the focal, allowing me to need only a few actual beads in similar hues.

Bead embroidery was clearly the way to go. Not only did it afford me a lot of flexibility in bead use, the densely stitched nature visually related to the needleweaving of the tapestry itself.
For the pendant I used a few brown goldstone beads, a small quantity of frosted silverlined rust orange 11s,  several intense orange-red faceted carnelian coins, 2mm lapis rounds, gold 11s, and frosted/silverlined and transparent 11s in jade green. I stitched them in more or less a structured pattern, endeavoring to mirror the overall shapes similar on each side without putting too much pressure on myself to make them 'identical'. After all, the tapestry isn't mirror-identical on each side either.
I finished the piece by stitching a gold right-angle-weave tube bail, edged with the last of the frosted orange 11s, and made a simple neck strap of citrine chips and rectangles spaced with gold 11s, interspersed with the remaining goldstone beads. I punched another set of holes in a pair of enamelled-blue copper drops, and used them as 'caps' to the strap, a nod to the blue tent in the tapestry.

Inspired by 'Adoration of the Magi'

What was I going to do with Marcie's latest Margie & Me challenge? The artwork she posed to us as a challenge was the 'Adoration of the Magi', at left. Lots of golds and oranges with ultramarine and lighers blues, and optional green. She also said to 'think shiny'. So I dug out my metal-lined seed beads, deep blue pearls, and at last--those gold plated fancy beads i bought a  couple years ago, waiting for Project Right.

And what a project it was!
I had just gotten a silverplated 'pendant blank' waiting to be filled with whatever I wanted, so I decided to do a small piece of bead embroidery and set it into the blank. I need the practice, andd working with such a small space (instead of the usual majestic scale of most bead embroidery) frees me AND brings it down into doability at this stage. Setting a small piece of bead embroidery into a metal frame also sets the piece solidly as 'jewelry' rather than a piece of beadwork that the creator has made wearable. I prefer my jewelry to be jewelry first, beadwork second.
I chose to finish the necklace with a simple bead chain, using ornate gold beads and a touch of deep blue glass. The freeform nature (and all the shiny colours) of the bead embroidery conveys the exuberance of the original painting, while the metal setting and gold bead chain reference the time period's preference for fancy adornments. The ultramarine adds another touch of art history--the lapis lazuli stone used to be ground up to make the ultramarine pigments, resulting in the rich blues you see in paintings just like this.

My second challenge piece focused more on the golds. I square-stitched around a shimmerstone glass cabochon with size 6 blue beads, then added gold and frosted burnt orange seed beads, and a line of green just below the orange (you can see a touch of it in the photo). I sewed the cab onto a rubbery hair elastic.