Friday Egg: Pinwheel!

Color! Spinning patterns exploding from a central flower! All on a topsy-turvy starflower base. This goose egg was a lot of fun to make, but please don't ask me which colors I used or the order they were put on because I simply can't tell you. Every color! All the colors!

Happy Friday!

Friday Egg: Blue Moonflowers

Revisiting a pattern that I love today with a more unusual colorway. These are hollyhocks done in turquoise with red outlines and black and gray stems. I started here with a goose egg dyed red. I outlined all the flowers and stems with beeswax and then washed the color back to white. Then I dyed the egg turquoise and rinsed it until it was a very light blue and waxed the inner petals. I dyed it again to a medium turquoise and waxed, a darker turquoise and waxed, and a final really dark turquoise color. Once all the blues were covered, I rinsed again and then dyed the egg black, waxed, and rinsed to gray. Once everything was waxed, I put it in a vinegar bath to etch so I could get some dimension to the design. You can't see it very well in this first photo, but in some of the close-ups you can get a better view.

Happy Friday!

Friday Egg: Species of Water

Today's piece is called "Species of Water." The blues remind me of the varied shades of blue and green you see in different kinds of water: ocean, lake, ice, deep and shallow. These chicken eggshells were injected with dye and allowed to sit and think for a few days. I then cut teardrop shapes into the eggshells using a diamond wheel on my Dremel. This was definitely the hardest part and I lost about a third of the eggshells that I started with.  I then carefully arranged the eggshells in different configurations until I found the one most pleasing and attached them to the white framework. I love looking at the various colors inside of each eggshell. I find it interesting that some eggs allowed the dye to migrate through the pores to the outer shell while others kept it completely inside.

Just a note: eggshell dust is hazardous to breathe, so if you are ever tempted to cut into an eggshell with a Dremel, use a dustbox or cut outside and wear a paint project respirator with filters for vapor/paint/dust. If you smell eggshell dust then you are breathing it in and you don't want to do that.

Happy Friday!

Friday Egg: Starry Seas

Friday Egg today is similar to the one I posted a couple of weeks ago, but in a completely different colorway. I like to see how choosing different colors can completely change the feel of a piece. I call this one "Starry Seas" because the eggshell decided that the pores of the egg would show on the open water areas, where I left the wave blank rather than draw stripes. It looks to me like stars in the sky reflected in a wave. I love the effect and I am happy when an eggshell asserts itself like this.

Friday Egg: Fish Traffic

Friday Egg today is a whimsical and bright traditional egg with non-traditional colors. It's on a chicken eggshell, so it fits right in the palm of your hand. I called it "Fish Traffic" because the way I arranged this fish reminded me of two way traffic on a street. 

Friday Egg: Sundown Seas

This Friday egg is called "Sundown Seas" because of the beautiful orange and yellow highlight colors that remind me of a sunset glinting off waves. All I need is a boat and a bottle of bubbly! Happy Friday!

Friday Egg: Caught

Planetary objects caught up in an invisible net of gravity. This is a goose egg. I started with a pencilled sketch on the egg, indicating where the circles would be and then where the net would fall. I dyed the egg gray and waxed the net, avoiding the areas where I wanted the net to be a different color, like the black net over the yellow circle below. Then I went through two different yellows and black before etching the eggshell back down to white with vinegar. I like how the etching caused some bleed out from the darker colors into the white areas. You can see the feathering around a black circle in the picture second down from here. It looks a bit like the net and the circle are merging, disintegrating into each other. Not static, nor caught in the net forever!