Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The Evil Queen

the evil queen


A few months or so ago when I was stocking up on my reading materials when I happened upon this book called “Fairest of All: A Tale of the Wicked Queen” that had the most amazing painting of snow white’s evil queen on the book sleeve. I should not have been surprised, I mean snow white seems to be everywhere right now; in movies, TV series and now books. It’s like she has been rediscovered again after 70 years.
I was tempted enough to buy the book just because of the cover but I am not a huge snow-white fan. To me it’s not the most interesting Disney cartoon. I am a huge “The Little Mermaid” fan, I think she is the best Disney princess ever but my mom would beg to differ. To her the best Disney cartoon will always be Cinderella!!
Disney really does have some gorgeous villains. For me Maleficent has to be the most beautiful but Evil Queen is a very close second.The cover art for the book only shows half of the evil queen’s face so in order to make a center cabochon for my necklace I made a flip of the picture in Photoshop and then connected the two pictures together to make her whole face.

the evil queen

Lately I have been thinking that there is probably an easier way to make my cabochons than pouring resin, which is extremely time consuming and the results are not always great. I finally decided to go with the clear glass domes. I wasn’t really sold on the idea of using the clear glass domes because I thought they would be too heavy for jewelry pieces but I was pleasantly surprised to find these glasses are extremely light. This method makes the cabochon making process incredibly fast and easy and I only have to wait a few minutes for the glue to dry and I am ready to start beading. No more hours of pouring resin and biting nails and wondering will they or won’t they come out OK. The glasses do give a little bit of a doming effect and make the picture look bigger but its not too much and it doesn’t distort the image.
the evil queen

I used a black and white palette again, only because it really complimented the picture and since she has purple eyeshadow on, I used hematite seed beads that have a little bit of purple to them. The frosted clear beads are from a shop in New York and they are just exquisite. They are beautiful and soft and I kept walking past them in the shop and in the end I just have to have them. The only downside is that I have no idea what they are made of and what they are called all I remember is that they were about 15 dollars a strand.
the evil queen

For the bezel, I decided to try out some of the techniques that are in the Dimensional Bead embroidery book. The beadwork around this piece is a duplicate of a piece in the book, which combines what the author calls an outside window bezel and a wave edge.i tried to follow the instructions in the book exactly as they were but my piece didn’t look anything like what I was seeing in the picture and I really wanted to emulate the design in the picture. What I ended up doing in order to get my beading looking more similar to what I was seeing in the book was to add a clear seed bead in between each of the frosted clear beads so that the black row of beads looks as though its running in between the beads rather than sitting on top of them.
the evil queen

 I didn’t have a clasp to finish this piece off so I made the necklace loop long enough that I could put my head through it but this method eats up a lot of beads and its just not practical. I need to invest in some clasps I guess and learn how to attach them :D
the evil queen


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