The first thing I made this week is a henna inspired martini glass which i'm really happy with. It's all freehand so it's not quite perfect, but then again henna isn't ever perfect either yet is always beautiful. This is my first one and I love it- enough that this particular one may just be for me. It was really bad for my hand- one of these leaves my hand feeling the way it does after 4 of the others.
later in the week, I made 2 more of these. Each differs slightly, but I am definitely getting the hang of this particular pattern. I plan on coming up with other patterns, but for now I'm perfecting this one.
I really want to make a wedding set in this style- one of my henna books has pictures of wedding henna where one hand has the face of the bride and the other the face of the groom, and it's really beautiful.
I almost hesitate to show you the commissioned set I made this week, because I feel very critical of it. I must have washed these glasses and started over half a dozen times. I even cracked one and had to grab a fresh glass. You've seen a martini glass and shotglasses in the "Daggers Series", but I grossly underestimated the difficulty I would have in transferring the same design to a wine glass. It wasn't until the 4th or 5th try that I finally hunted down a roll of electrical tape to get the outer triangles as true as I possibly could on a curved surface. Due the amount of frustration I had with this set, I feel a bit of unwarranted bias against it and don't imagine i'll be making another of its kind for quite some time. Though I still feel like i can get a sharper angle than that so i might give it one more go....
I think that's the hard thing with commissioned work, sometimes the vision of the client doesn't fit the object or working style of the artist. For instance, martini glasses feel more lines, edges, structured, where as these large wine glasses feel more curved, rounded, like curved lines, swirls, tendrils of leaves. Imagine if instead of leaves, there were flower petals blooming out from the stem of the glass to curl up around the sides of the glass...in my minds eye, the effect is incredible!
ReplyDeleteEven so though, the detail work on the glasses is beautiful and the time and effort you put into them shows...I hope the owner of those glasses values all that effort to give them what they wanted! I hope you've set aside your perfectionist hat for a moment to commend yourself on a job well done... ;-)
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