Underwater Marvels Propel My Art
Digging in my jewelry box for turquoise pieces, I came across this recycled glass and sterling silver pendant.
The pendant is the first piece where I combined the silver directly with the glass. After this piece, I created the process to combine recycled fine silver directly to recycled glass.
The sterling in this piece is connected with like tiny cotter pins through holes I drilled into the glass, seen best in the bottom two pieces of silver in the second photo.
Orange poppies were mixed in with the tulips and yellow poppies at the Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden
In addition to the tulips and poppies, there were other flowers which were good subjects with the macro lens.
Tulips at the Golden Gate Park’s Queen Wilhemina Tulip Garden were accompanied by generous plantings of poppies.
All phases of the bloom were evident
I enjoyed taking these before, during, and after-the-bloom photos
After visiting the Cartier and America exhibit, we stopped by Golden Gate Park‘s Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden.
After knowing about the garden for a few years, I am happy that I remembered it during tulip season.
On my computer’s desktop, I have a gadget that gives me a constant slide show of my pictures from my hard drives. These images recently caught my eye.
During the second day of Thomas Hill’s wire sculpture workshop, we chose a drawing or photo of an animal to use as a reference. Choosing the drawing or photo has a big part to play in the final outcome.
If the photo shows the animal at an angle, only shows parts of the animal, or is short on detail, then the animal will be harder to recreate in wire. I wish I’d have had all these photos while I was in the workshop.
Drawing the outline of the creature helps determine the rough shape, which I did based on the photo in the upper left corner of the collection above.
We start with steel wire from spools, so knowledge of where to start, and which parts of the creature to create in what order is key.
When someone with a natural resource management degree saw my sculpture and identified the bird as if seeing one in the wild, I was satisfied that the wire is pretty representative of the pileated woodpecker. Even so, the bird looks chunkier than a live bird would be. One line of wire down the gut was too long, and I may do a little surgery on the bird before attaching him to a piece of copper. I am brewing an idea for a half round copper form to attach the woodpecker on so it can hang vertically on the wall as if it’s on a tree.
At the beach in all these photos, the sea glass is protected and it’s illegal to collect any. The beach is amazing, sea glass has replaced the sand normally seen on beaches. The tinkling sound of the glass being tumbled is wonderful to hear. The beach is such a treasure that it’s been designated an official state park.
Beaches after a storm, and beaches after high tide are great places to look for sea glass. Sometimes there’s sea glass in the water still being tumbled. Many beaches with such a high concentration of glass such as this one are often full of glass because they are near a closed dump of some kind. Or, as seen in yesterday’s post, Sea Glass at the Beach Part 1, the dump is still active.
Some were a public dump and some are, or were, a private dumping ground for a glass artist or community of glass artists.
In this Mexican harbor I found so many pieces of broken bottle glass that my pockets were full.
Notice the high percentage of jagged glass; that means the harbor workers are throwing bottles into the ocean. I’d like to go back in a few years and see how much tumbled sea glass is there and if the harbor has a new policy about trash disposal.
Beaches with a lot of drift wood and glass are great for photo opportunities. And, of course for collecting.
View of Kona Coast from off the Kohala Coast.
While our friends went diving we stayed on land so we could fly the next day. I took some pictures of them and one of the dive sites from a new vantage point: above the water.
The North Kohala countryside has many shades of green
Morning
Yes, there are roads here. And, ravines.
The sun sets over the ocean
