Believe it or not, I really did finish this in February!

[lobsterdesigns]

And here it is in all its glory, the Bead Journal Project piece for last month. It was quite a hard month and I wasn't in the mood for complex beading, so I picked a soothing green and went for simple straight lines. They took longer than expected, of course, and not all of my bugle beading lines turned out dead straight, but the overall effect is still pretty and as usual, I learnt something from it (mainly how to get my bugle beading lines straighter!). I'll try to start the March one soon, the fabric I'm planning for it should be here any day now, as I hate doing this near the end of the month and feeling pressured by the deadline.

Comments

[jelazakazone]

It's lovely! On a related note: ack! I completely forgot about this. I don't know if I will actually be able to follow through. I've been working on my own projects at a snail's pace. And I mean snaily snail.

[lobsterdesigns]

I know the feeling. Maybe whip up something really quick for Jan and Feb to get you back on track? I saw one BJP where for one month they had literally sewn about three beads onto a square of fabric.

[jelazakazone]

Well, if I can count the different things I've done on my fan wall hanging, then I'm good for Jan/Feb/Mar...:D

[mirrorshard]

I really like that. The combination of the flower/firework/sea-anemone green and the shiny almost-technological beadwork really works well.

[lobsterdesigns]

Thank you!

Do you know, I hadn't really thought of that. I pulled out several fabrics in that colour and this was the one I felt most drawn to, though I did vaguely think about how it would look with diagonal lines of beading. I think the fabric design is meant to be sea urchins.

As for the almost-technological, I'm still in love with black/grey/white/clear beads from the January piece, and I don't have all that huge a stash of green beads so they ended up coming along too. I'm really enjoying working with a limited colour palette, though now I'm struggling to express why that is. Part of it is reducing it to something manageable, allowing me to explore happily within a relatively narrow focus. Part of it is something soothing about simplicity.

[virginiadear.livejournal.com]

This almost always comes as a surprise to people who don't, themselves, paint, but most artists have limited palettes. Pigments were (are) expensive; if you had to buy the raw mineral and grind it yourself, as was done before the Industrial Revolution, and grinding pigment by hand to a uniform smoothness is also a lot of *work.* If you were born a bit later in the historical timeline, you could buy paints in convenient squeeze tubes, but those were (are) expensive, too. Usually, it's about six colors/hues, plus white and black, in an artist's palette.
(Is there a point to this, virginiadear? Well, yes.)
It *is* easier to work with the tints (hue plus white to produce a lighter, paler version) and shades (hue plus black to make a darker version) of just one color, than it is to be fiddling around with more than one, and the more of "more than one" there are, the more difficult it becomes to predict how the colors will influence each other, which they *do* do.
Of course more colors/hues are produced by blending two or more hues from the palette to a homogenous new hue, and that does happen, but because the new color was made from the existing palette it will remain congruous, harmonious, when applied to the canvas (or wood panel) with the others.

I do think you're right, though, in your observation that a limited palette is soothing, especially in cool tones with cool hues, as with your beads on the green batik fabric. There's less processing for the eyes to do. Art instructors can get on your case for "lack of visual/textural interest," but in my opinion that is nothing more than *their* opinion.