Artist Challenge:Decorating an Egg in Gustav Klimt's Style





It seems that this 'stay at home' enforced time due to Covid 19 spurred many artists to challenge themselves.  Here's mine! 

The Challenge:  Select an artist you love and a painting you love.  Apply the style of a 2 dimensional painting to a 3 dimensional object.  

It was my challenge to myself and I chose Gustav Klimt and his painting 'Tree of Life'
https://www.gustav-klimt.com/The-Tree-Of-Life.jsp

My hollow turkey egg was ready for the first covering of polymer clay.   While that was curing, I looked through my stash of polymer canes (designs in polymer) and selected some that would work.  Next I made a few more and extruded strips to use for the tree and branches.  



The design was sketched on the polymer covered egg and using a type of liquid polymer I applied the branches in areas and cured them in the oven.  I've learned to do a few at a time to keep shapes stable - that means baking the egg several times,  After the branches were done, the flowers and leaves and figures were applied and cured.  



All that was left was to fill in the gold background.  To do that I chopped pieces of Premo Gold and applied the small pieces making sure I took advantage of the mica shift.  https://thebluebottletree.com/mica-shift-polymer-clay/

Mica shift is a polymer clay technique where an illusion of change of color or dimension is achieved when using metallic or pearl polymer clay.  In this case then I rolled the gold clay in a certain way, the mica lays flat and the polymer looks shiny gold.  When I cut it in small pieces and mix it up some of the mica lays flat and some does not.  It looks like I have 2 colors of gold but there is only one.   This was a perfect solution for the background.  



After the egg cured for the final time, I sanded and sanded and buffed and polished to make a smooth shiny finish.   Pretty happy with the end result and maybe Gustav Klimt would be too!





            
Location: Prescott, AZ, USA

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