In thumbnail size! (Click for a bigger view) Here's the one I made for the children's room at church: Which I'm sure you will agree is far better, from the standpoint of wanting to make something that boys can stand to look at for more than a fraction of a second, than what the package would have had me create: Pink is fine, purple is fine, but both together and swamping the thing like that? Owww. Here's the one I made for my classroom, which is very highly symbolic: Besides the cross + butterfly combo, we have: Blue: represents heaven Purple: symbolizes royalty White: stands for [-]my sudden suspicion that too much purple too close to the butterfly would reduce the contrast between butterfly and cross[/-] purity, which turns out pretty well since it's at the center of the cross and Christ's purity is central to his ability to fulfill God's plans via the cross. Obviously I planned that all along Pink and orange: underscore the fact that I like bright colors Oh, and brown: um, I just always visualize butterflies' bodies as brown Believe it or not, I think I had the color scheme laid out that way pretty much from the moment I picked the suncatcher up in the store. Aside from having purple where the white is. I don't even think I've ever seen pink suncatcher paint before, but I looked at that butterfly and thought "pink outside and orange inside". KJ did a couple too: I have no insight into her designs other than to say they look pretty spiffy, despite my personal objection to putting green on any part of a butterfly. While we're at it, here are some old ones of mine: I don't know if you can tell, but there are several orange patches on the dog. I used a glitter paint for those. Don't know if the glitter shows up, but it's there. Not a very good image of it, but hopefully you can guess that the lower leaves are darker than the upper. I had two greens available (and possibly not enough of one of them) and thought, "This is mostly two colors. Maybe I should make it mostly three colors so that it's more interesting." So I made it mostly red, green, and dark green. Or red, green, and light green, depending on how you look at it. Not much to say here. The white has a bit of a frosty thing going on. This is possibly my second-oldest suncatcher, and it's faded from hanging in my bedroom window for years. I made this one for KJ about 3-4 years ago. Unfortunately the flash caught it right in the entrance hole, so the brown of the walls looks reddish here. I really put my color arrangement skills to work on this one, as you can hopefully tell. (Hint: Notice how I spread out the areas of blue and contrasted the two groups of flowers.)
Re: Suncatchers! (Christmas ornaments) So here are some more suncatchers I've dug up. This is undoubtedly either one of the first two suncatchers I ever did or (more likely?) a suncatcher that someone else (Mom?) did. Either way, it's faded from long years of hanging in a window, but you can still see how beautiful it must have been to begin with. The textures make it so much prettier. I'm more confident that I had a hand in this one. Again the textures bring out the beauty of the piece and make it look more artsy, more painstaking, less like something that might have been plucked out of a bargain bin on a whim. Here we see that, even at a young age, I preferred realism in my art, as (1) the stems and leaves are all green and (2) the butterfly is not. Green does not belong on butterflies. Luna moths are the exception that proves the rule, as they flutter around at night and so have a chance to stand out and look pretty because they are not competing with the surrounding vegetation. This is more recent, which is to say it's still pretty old -- probably from the era of the dog and slipper, a little while after the cardinal. Mechanically, it didn't turn out very well. There are a lot of bubbles, and I didn't use enough paint. But I still like the way the use of color turned out, despite the orange blurring together with the brown a bit. I thought I remembered using a little glitter paint on this one, but I can't see any signs of it . . . but there might have been a little in the bandana. One year, my brother and I divided up some Christmas ornaments to color. I was pretty satisfied with the ones I got. This was the exception, but I don't remember there being much of anything better. I've never cared for the song, especially the standard rendition; the TV production is depressing; and drums simply do not have anything to do with Christmas in my head. I do like the way this one came out. I feel like it's nothing special, but it works. I'm not sure where the pink came from. That's not a standard suncatcher paint color! Did the set of ornaments come with pink? That seems likely. On the other hand, bells and Christmas resonate for me. Silver bells, Carol of the bells, and the old bell ornaments that I was very fond of hanging on the tree. So I'm sure I was very happy to get to color this one. I like the frosty white look. The plain opaque white worked better on the cross upthread, I think, but if you're going to make a suncatcher color opaque, you may as well do something interesting with it, right? This is very Christmassy, with the orange brightening the ribbon up a bit and the pink contrasting with the red while still matching the red and white. I suspect that, when it came time to divide up who got what, I pounced on this immediately. Sure, most of it's going to end up green, but look at all those other bits! They could be any old color, without having to match each other! As you see, I didn't go too wild with it, but I seem to remember having fun dividing up which colors went on which ornaments. Having a frosty white garland, of course, allows the garland to contrast with the ornaments and pretty much everything else. It might have been nice to have the ornaments a lighter color, but having them match each other in luminosity is a good idea . . . and being able to position the thing in front of a light renders the concern moot. Making her dress green probably wasn't the best idea for hanging on a Christmas tree, but she just looked like she should have a green dress, you know? I'm not sure how I managed the two oranges, but I assume I used a set of paint that came with the ornaments and another set that was lying around. The color arrangement really doesn't look very good unless there's plenty of light shining on or through it, as here . . . in which case the shoddy job with the blue wings becomes obvious. Oh well. The way the flash caught her mouth and eyes here is unfortunate. I dunno. Maybe the wings shouldn't have been blue? White would be traditional, but it would just be white . . . red would have been too much . . . purple maybe? But blue is the sky, and angels are in the sky. The rest of the color scheme, I think, is solid.
This one's for Grandma. I thought about alternating red and purple on the petals and maybe making the lip of the pot white, but ultimately I kept things simple and bright. The green is a proper deep green, not as blue-green as it appears here. I was considering the possibility of using this batch to refresh the hummingbird, but with yellow this opaque I don't want to risk totally obscuring the texture in the moon/sun there.
