Dreams of growing up

EDIT: this little pendant is now up for sale on etsy

For a while now I’ve wanted to make an orange spotted tiger clearwing piece; probably as soon as I’ve stumbled over pictures of it over on pinterest. But alas, I became sick inbetween and while I already had the separate components finished up it took me ages to put them together.

I started off with the puppa; I made it from polymer clay and then brushed it with the fimo mica powder before adding all the details. I think I also added the shine before painting is as in the “real thing” the markings appear matter than the golden backdrop. (The actual puppa is shinier, it’s almost as reflective as a mirror. And when the butterfly gets close to hatching it turns clear and you can actually see the pattern of the wings through it. It’s stunning. I might make another piece with that in the future) The caterpillar was a bit fiddly( as you might imagine, but otherwise fairly straightforward. I did have to cut a few of the segments in parts in order to have him look upwards and hence make the dreaming part of this piece a little more enhanced. I also made the caterpillars eyes fairly shiny.

Another thing I opted for in this piece was to create a custom “lid” for my glass cylinder. Unfortunately I was only able to get ones that had a little loop on top which will work well if I make designs where the flat part will be at the bottom, but for this sculpt I didn’t think it would work out well enough. And since my snowwhite piece worked out so well with the custom backing, I decided to give it another go. I came up eith a few different options (which I actually might turn into molds), a grass one, a wood one and one that would be very plain but onto which I would paint a fully developed orange spotted tiger clearwing. And while I really liked the idea of the painting and having all parts of the metamorphosis in one piece, I decided against it because it would probably have distracted from the overall look of the piece too much. Also it would have been so much extra work and would have made the piece really really expensive.

 This is a more inspirational approach than a naturalistic one and I really liked the outcome of it! I don’t know yet if I’d like to go into a more associative direction with my sculpts or maybe just realise this in the naming (which up to now for my pieces is fairly straightforward, which, to be honest, sometimes bothers me a bit); what do you think?

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