February Dress-Up Challenge: Submission

As you may already know; (followers of Sew Loquacious) February's Dress-Up Challenge topic was Gustav Klimpt in honor of his many romantic compositions. 

Since I have a giant poster of his Portrait of Eugenia Primavesi from 1916 in my bedroom, this seemed the best place to begin.



First, I found a decent reproduction online and then printed it out at 30% transparency on some fabulous fabric/paper stuff my friend Karen left at my house.  (Thanks Karen!)



My first inclination was to bead the whole dress and then I got all worried and stuff about the Dress-up Challenge being all about PAPER and thought about doing the dress in tissue flowers... remember the ones where you wrap a little square around the end of a pencil, dip into glue and then compose?....and then got the go-ahead-anyway from Angela, so I started beading.  I bought this snazzy embroidery hoop which looks great, but is only usable until there are too many beads......



The paper/fabric product held up really well and did not start to stretch or wrinkle until the very end when I was really man-handling it to get it finished.

Here is a picture of the back... I used clear thread to attach the beads so it's pretty invisible, but you can see all the holes in the paper backing.



I was working with different sized beads, some from my own box, some new to fit the color scheme and many many that were generously given to me by my friend Elise.

Here is a close up of the section near the bottom where there are two red swirly patterns (visible in the picture above prior to the beige beads being added).



So, the challenge was to not only interpret the colors and shapes, but to remain consistent with the bead color choices from earlier in the process.  This project took about 16 or so hours over many days to complete.

Here's a shot of just past half way finished!




Since I was working with large and tiny sizes of beads, many of the finest details were averaged out, however, I wanted to respect her neckline as closely as possible and used only seed beads in that area - sacrificing some color accuracy, but creating a delicate frame for her face.



After I finished (at midnight last night!), I mounted it on cardboard and then on black poster board and insterted a 100% print of her face and neck just so she didn't look so faded out with all the luster of her dress.  I debated about her hands... just bead over them, replace with a full print? I just left them as is... 'Hope you like it!



Here is a semi-side view to give an idea of the dimensionality of the piece.



This was a fabulous project... I have really only done one beading project before (see January Catch up post) and even though this is clearly a hodge podge of colors and shapes, I believe it works on its own merit!


Thanks SO MUCH for viewing my project and sharing in the process.  Please go see all the other fabulous entries for the February Dress-up Challenge!

And, a big Thank You goes out to Angela for organizing this creative challenge!

Take care,
Liza