Pull Up Those Bootstraps, Wonder Woman!

It's been 4 days since the last post. How do the days go by so quickly? Was it always like this? How do women who have children and a full-time job even manage to live! Kudos to their energy and dedication to something bigger than yourself.

Speaking of bigger than yourself -- the picture above is a Custom Oriel I made for a woman, K. My customs can often be specific images -- vintage photos, Hollywood stars, favorite companion animals. But K. wanted me to make her a pendant that represented "who I really am, not the back-crippled, overweight, aging woman that I feel I am most of the time".

I let this request sit and brew for a long time, but the image that came to me was Wonder Woman: strong, powerful, aggressive, beautiful, explosive. Not the external picture of K., but of what she carries inside of her. I knew that the red, white, and blue colors of Wonder Woman were wrong -- K. tends to wear soft blues, mauves, beige -- so I'd have to think about that, too.

I started sourcing images of Wonder Woman on the internet, but I didn't like the photos of Lynda Carter and other faux Wonder Women. And most of the cartoon or anime illustrations were to distorted or angry. Finally on page 32 of the Google image search I found this great image. Black hair whipping around, leaping forward on big, strong thighs, this Wonder Woman felt like who K. was. I imported theimage into my creativity program, printed her out on matte photo paper, then took pencils, both metallic and color, and colored her uniform a burgundy. I added a Swavorski rhinestone crystal to her headband (notice this is actually a representation of the third eye?).

I then decided to try something different in the oriel construction: make it 3-D. I used 3 panes of glass: 2 flat for the bottom and middle, and the top one beveled glass. For the bottom layer of the oriel, I chose a mustard yellow ribbon that I fused with my can't-live-without sheer ribbon with gold flourish design. This I placed face down on the bottom glass -- the flourish design facing outward. The mustard yellow became the background for the K.'s collage. I glued on a few teeny weeny gold stars (used in the fashion nail industry -- I found these in a market in Mexico) in teh space where the image would not rest. Then I glued the colored, cut-out image of WW to the middle pane of glass and added more stars around her (I actualy would have added even more stars, but I didn't want to go overboard for K.s pendant.) Then I added the beveled glass and continued on with the process. And I added 2 yellow crystal bead stars and 1 silver one to the jump ring -- which adds motion and splash. This was a wonderful -- and one powerful -- pendant. I hope K. likes it!