Getting out of a rut challenge

I am a fully paid up member of the Frit Happens Forum, spending more time on the site that is good for me I suspect.  But it is a huge source of inspiration and an extremely friendly place.

Anyway a challenge was set - a partner sends you a picture and you use the colours in that picture as a source of inspiration for a bead or a set of beads.

Well this is the picture I recieved from my sending partner.

And I got my thinking cap on. 

Several attempts later I came up with these.

My first attempts were too complicated, trying to get too much onto one bead and getting too tied up in the image and not just the colours.

So I decided to step back and just think what are the colours - shades of blue, white, sable, green, grey and black.

Thought that getting them all in would be overdoing it a bit, so I decided to keep to the ones that have the biggest influence on the image or took up the most amount of space in the image.

That took it to the blues of the sky, the sable of the beach, the whites in the clouds and surf and a bit of green and coral/pink in the details.

After playing around with rods of glass in these colours I settled on dark and light transparent turquoise and opaque turquoise and sky blue.  Dark ivory for the sable, and a couple of shades of green.  The darker green is Effetre Pea Green, but I don't know what the other is as its from an unlabelled rod.  I thought about using a white, but was worried it would be too white, if you get what I mean.  So I went for Effetre clear and etched it as it gives a better feel of surf/sea foam.  Then some coral, just a bit.

I don't usually use these blues, and rarely use coral.  I do, however use a lot of ivory.  Greens almost never.

I also decided to use the excerise to get to grips with dot placement - something I keep promising myself to concentrate on but always seem to avoid and just do dots now and again.

I also decided to keep the design really simple - but to try and link all the colours together by repeating the same design elements - donuts and raised dots.

When the beads were done I lined them all up and tried various combinations but still something wasn't right.  Q - What was it?

A - they were too shiney.

So out came the etching solution - and hey presto!

I am really pleased with the result and most certainly will be returning to these colours and designs again.  I have often thought about using the coral, but had not thought of teaming it up with the greens - I really like this combination.  Just need to figure out what glass it is now.

Oh! and I just had to make one of these as well.

He's not a  PPPPP..Perfect Penguin - but I love him just the same.

So if you are getting stuck in a rut - get someone to send you a picture and challenge yourself.