I made this bead in the same session as the first batch of mini-stripeys I featured, and it uses the same palette of colors. So far, it's the best of the twisted dot beads I attempted, and series has a ways to go before I really consider it successful. Ah, Lani Ching makes it all look so easy! But choosing colors for twisted dots is harder than looks, particularly in a palette that is not your ‘home’.

Twisted dot bead, hollow, 2006. Bullseye soda lime glass, roughly 14x17mm. Image has had background blurred, bottom of bead lightened and extensive modification made to highlight area.

I was relatively happy with the way the color worked in this bead. Interestingly enough, looking at the full-size image, I note that the green separates at the boundaries some, taking on a olive cast at the edges. I also discovered that shadows, at least on glass, tend have a thin, dark boundary which is a visual, rather than chemical effect. So when I was attempting to clean up the highlight, I actually took a drawing tool and drew in this darker edge on parts of the highlight. (See especially the top edge.) Note also my wretched job blending said greens in the triangle just above the middle top of the highlight. Lousy. (Not only that I screwed up and threw away the full size version, after degrading it by saving it as a .jpg about 5x in a row; so now I have to stop screwing with this. Moral: always save in non-lossy native format; then save off the .jpg...)

Original, untouched version of the same bead.

Frankly, this is scraping of the bottom of the barrel, to the point where the post probably should've been in the in the Howto category. That is, euugh! the non-round dots, the bad shaping, the bubbles...maybe I should be practicing making beads, instead of moaning about my depiction of them? Nah. That'd be too much like work.

file created 29aug06

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