Thursday 23 June 2011

Which Came First?

Apart from potatoes, I have never painted a subject so often as these blue jellyfish!  And not one remains here for long, so I thought I had better paint another which will now go into my Etsy shop.  I wonder how long this one will stick around for!

If I had known how popular they were going to be, I would have taken far more reference photographs at Boston Aquarium when we were there.  However, I will have the chance to take as many as I like later in the year as we have booked a return trip and plan to not only see what we missed the last time, but also re-visit some of the places we fell in love with two years ago.  So if you see some strange English lady snapping away furiously at the jellyfish, you'll know who it is....
 
By last weekend I could procrastinate no longer over designing and knitting a very small chicken who had to be completely poseable and also be able to lay an egg.  I sort of had an idea in my head as to how to go about it, but knew it would take a great deal of trial and error, maths and illegible scribbling before it was complete.  Sure enough, I think this took a total of nine or ten hours to create, with not too many mistakes on the way.  The head swivels round, with the joint hidden by the ruff of feathers, and the wings are not only button jointed but wired for movement outwards as well.
This is her party trick - I'm keeping the internal workings to myself for now as they took a long time to design and besides, do you really need to see up a chicken's bum?
Even the chicken looks bemused by it all!  She is about 3 inches tall and now needs a couple of friends to keep her company - at least they should not take so long, depending on whether I can decipher the five pages of scrawl in my design notebook!

3 comments:

Houseelf said...

Good luck in your hen coop. There are so many plumages with hens. My favs are the speckled sort like in the nursery rhyme.

Great jellyfish painting too.

Soggibottom said...

Wouldn't mind a couple of cluckers around the cottage to be honest.
No way am I looking up a chickens bum !
:-)xxx

Magpie Magic said...

I love your jellyfish and think they look fantastic. I love, love, love mine. :-)

The chickens look fab! Been playing with birds too. They seem to be in the air... LOL xoxox