When you get a message like this....

"I was wondering if you could make some beads which are inspired by my favourite paintings..."

well, my mouth started watering and the torch began to beckon..... oooh I thought; you've just got to have a go haven't you!?

Well, I was very taken by the idea but didn't quite know where to begin... I love it when someone asks me to do something that I'm not sure that I can do..All worried and excited all at the same time...

Now, if you want to do a little quiz then

don't scroll down yet!

Study the pictures of the three beads below carefully:

Which three paintings do you think these beads in the pictures are inspired by............

no peeking too far down the page mind, till you've had a guess!!

(Clue: Think Impressionism and Post-Impressionism)

Have you had a guess?

OK now we can scroll on ;-)

ANSWERS:

The three fave paintings were:

Van Gogh - Starry Night

Klimt - The Kiss

Monet - Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge.

Did you guess right???

The fab request for the beads came in during the summer holidays, so I waited a couple of weeks for the kids to go back to school, having momentary google flicks to the millions of renditions of the said paintings to study them a bit, then I had a play..

VAN GOGH

This one I found the easiest of all for some reason. I think because the swirl of the sky lends itself to the swirl of the glass and the colours were clearly in my head so I could translate them to glass colours straight away. You know how much I love the night sky.... ;-). So here's the finished bead.

It was great to get that movement and the spirals helped me to get the impression of the brush stroke direction which in some areas seems pretty deep so I used plenty of clear encasing glass! Finishing them with sizeable bubbles, I hope adds to the feeling of a 'lightness of hand' which I think comes across so much in this painting.

KLIMT

This one I found crazy hard to do. (Loads of attempts)... I think it is because there are so many contradictions in the painting so there are many very different aspects all vying for their special piece of attention... Round female shapes and swirls, masculine blocks and straight lines (which don't really lend themselves to glass!) This is where I got to:

I liked the way the black and ivory section mirrored the section on the 'mans side' on the left and the way the glass webbed I got those kind of squarey bits I was after. Of course, the other main constituent had to be plenty of glittery gold to bring it to life.

MONET

Here is the Monet bead. I wanted to get an idea across of the brush strokes and the watery-ness in the painting, the depth and the colours (Soooo many colours here to give credence to!!) I love the end result, but phew... I definitely kissed a few frogs before I came across this one sitting on my lily-pad!

I ended up looking at the texture and colours on the water (sort of bottomy-right in the painting), I really wanted to capture that beautiful almost iridescent blue there.