May Monthly Challenge Recap

Sometimes the more abstract something is the more varied the interpretations are. That was the case with this month's challenge painting by Picasso, Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle. Come along and check out the beautiful works of art that we made inspired by this intriguing painting!


Now it is your turn! If you posted about this month's challenge, enter your link here for a chance to win some great prizes from our sponsors!

Art Bead Evolutions :: Stratum

I won’t lie to you….this was a hard challenge for me. I know that this painting is called Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle, but I truly did not see that at all! If I have trouble with a painting, I will print it out and turn it upside down to give myself a different perspective.

When I did that, what I saw were layers. To me it is a lot of layers of paper, as if you dropped all your bills and letters and junk mail on a table and made an artful everyday still life.

All those different textures peeking out intrigued me. So I set out to teach myself how to make veneers by various methods. I focused on the white and black speckled texture, the black and tan mottled texture and the pink, blue, orange and teal colors from the painting.

First I made the orange veneer (I don't have a picture of that, you will just have to trust me). I have never had much luck with canes, preferring instead to use the clay as my canvas and coloring it with various inks, stains and paints. But a bullseye cane is one of the simplest there is and layered on a pumpkin colored clay they really pop!

Next I decided to make something speckled. I decided that it would be too easy to just paint or ink those dots. So I devised a way to create Swiss cheese holes in the top white layer for depth. Manipulating it a bit through the pasta machine made the holes more shallow than I wanted, but I like the pockmarked effect, and I enhanced some of them after they were on the bead. The pink veneers were from an older project that I happened to have lying around, and worked in perfectly with this oddball mix.

Every month I try to teach myself something new in addition to exploring the art as inspiration. The remaining veneers were things that I learned from my favorite polymer clay guru, Debbie Crothers. I have taken several online classes from this lovely Aussie instructor through CraftArtEdu so when I saw that she was releasing her new series Explorations in Swellegant to create rusty and crusty veneers, I didn’t even hesitate a minute to hit the buy button. That was in January. And as is usual for me, I buy something, or sign up for a class without really having any intention of following through in that instant. So when I saw these paper scraps as layers - a slice of a life, if you will -  I remembered her class. And I am so glad I did! Miss Debbie is such a marvelous instructor. I told her that I felt like she was a friend who just popped over for a bit of clay play. She is thorough and engaging and so giving with her knowledge. Take anything with her and you will be wildly inspired!

I wrapped each large bead in a variety of the six different veneers I made so that no two are exactly alike. To make them my own, I added "faux bead caps" by dipping the ends in embossing powder for a metallic antiqued brass hammered texture that seems to work harmoniously with the Swellegant I used to make them look like bits of crusty old metal.

Since these beads are all quite large (about 3/4"), I wanted to make a statement necklace. I originally wanted to use a set of three (which is what my Simple Truths Sampler Club members received). But I couldn't make it work. Instead, I picked one as a focus.

I recently received these new wire frame components from Nunn Design and thought it would make an interesting sort of frame to set that bead apart. I had to stretch it a bit to fit the large bead but I quite like the sort of faceted shape. I was cleaning up (but hardly making a dent!) in my studio and was wrangling the fibers that I have collected. (Four bins of them!) I thought that the frame would look great to pull together different fibers - yarn, string, silks, sari ribbon - into a tassel wrapped with bronze wire and golden charlotte beads. For the rest of the necklace I just dove into my stash to make a long-ish slip-on necklace with a melange of beads ranging from carved bone, irregular ceramic, various stones and agates in many shapes and finishes. This is definitely a statement - not for the faint of heart! I am wearing it today with dark indigo jeans and a pale blush pink tunic. I think I might wear this next week at Bead & Button in Milwaukee in my new black maxi dress!

I have also been playing around with the same idea but in different shapes, including smaller rounds for earrings and some olive shaped beads as well. Thinking about making a layered patterned shield shaped pendant as well. So many possibilities!

Stratum means a layer or a series of layers, specifically of rock in the ground. These layered beads - and this necklace - have that stratified look of fantasy rock comprised of patterns and textures scattered across my desk or counter, and it is that layer and texture and pattern and color that I love!

Check back tomorrow for our monthly challenge recap!

May Monthly Challenge

Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle

Pablo Picasso

1914

Oil On Canvas

About the Art

This painting is an example of the Cubist technique that was developed by Picasso and Braque in Paris before the First World War. Cubism moved away from the traditional realistic depiction of an object from a single viewpoint. Rather than attempt to create a three-dimensional likeness, objects were fragmented and seen from different angles, blurring the distinction between two- and three-dimensional representation. The two artists were influenced to some extent by Cézanne's method of breaking down all forms into basic geometric shapes.
Here, the fragmented forms of a table, a bowl of fruit, a bottle, a newspaper and a violin can be identified. The artist has used areas of strong flat colour, painted dots, bare canvas and grains of sand to suggest the presence of these objects. 
This combination is characteristic of Picasso's Synthetic Cubism, in which he put together, or 'synthesised', areas of colour and texture to evoke recognisable objects. The shapes and colours are skilfully balanced to maintain the appearance of flatness and they echo one another throughout to create a satisfying and harmonious whole.
—The National Gallery

About the Artist

Spanish expatriate Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, as well as the co-creator of Cubism.

“Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should. Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.”
—Pablo Picasso

Born in Málaga, Spain, in 1881, Pablo Picasso, became one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges Braque) of Cubism. A Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and stage designer, Picasso was considered radical in his work. After a long prolific career, he died on April 8, 1973, in Mougins, France. The enormous body of Picasso's work remains, however, and the legend lives on—a tribute to the vitality of the "disquieting" Spaniard with the "sombrepiercing" eyes who superstitiously believed that work would keep him alive. For nearly 80 of his 91 years, Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that contributed significantly to—and paralleled the entire development of—modern art in the 20th century.
—Biography.com

Our Sponsors

Please visit us tomorrow to see the prizes!

How to Enter the Monthly Challenge:

1. You need to have a Pinterest account. Go get one ASAP if you don't have one already. It's easy, fun and inspiring.

2. Email us at absmonthlychallenge@gmail.com to get added to the monthly challenge board.

Subject: Monthly Challenge Board Request

You will be emailed an invite to the board within 48 hours. Accept the invite and you are ready to pin your entries.

3. Two ways to pin your entry to the board:

Pin your photo from the internet (on your blog, Etsy shop, etc.)

Add your photo directly from your computer

Create something using an art bead that fits within our monthly theme. We post the art to be used as your inspiration to create. This challenge is open to jewelry-makers, fiber artists, collage artist, etc. The art bead can be created by you or someone else. The challenge is to inspire those who use art beads and to see all the different ways art beads can be incorporated into your handiwork.

An Art Bead must be used in your piece to qualify for the monthly challenge.

***Beads strung on a chain, by themselves and beads simply added to wire or cord will not be accepted.***

Please add the tag or title MAY ABS to your photos. Include a short description, who created the art beads and a link to your blog, if you have one.

Deadline is May 30th

You may upload two entries per month.

ENTRIES for ART BEAD ARTISTS!

• Beads Makers Pinterest Board - Art beads must be created by you and fit the Art Bead Scene's monthly challenge theme. They can be made for the challenge or ones you have made before. Two entries per month are allowed. 

One entry will be picked by the editors each month for a free month of advertising on the Art Bead Scene. Bead entries have to be pinned by the 30th of the month.

Beads only - do not post jewelry on this board. If a post doesn't fit the challenge it will be deleted.

Monthly Challenge Recap

• Please post at least one single shot of your creation on the Pinterest Board. This will be used to make a collage for the Monthly Challenge Gallery. Every creation will be added to the collage, regardless of a blog post. So everyone gets included!

Your entry must be on Pinterest 2 days BEFORE the recap to be included.

• Be sure to share with us the name of the art bead artist in the description of your photo so that if you are selected for the weekly Perfect Pairings on Friday, both you as the designer and the art bead artist can get the credit you both deserve!

• An Link Up button will be added to the bottom of the Monthly Challenge Recap post. Here you will be able to link up your blog post if you have one.  Be sure to hop around and see all the great inspiration and leave some comment love!

• The Monthly Challenge Recap with Blog Tour will be posted on May 31st.

Monthly Challenge Winners

• One prize winner will be selected at random from all pictures posted on the Pinterest board.

• One prize winner will be selected at random from all blog posts added to the hop for the Monthly Challenge Recap post. So if you want to be in the pool for the second prize, be sure to use the Link button at the bottom of the post to share your process and inspirations!

• Winners will be randomly chosen from all the qualifying entries on June 1st.

Perfect Pairings: Designer + Art Bead Artist

• Perfect Pairings focus on both the jewelry designer and the art bead artist. 

• Be sure to point out all the art bead artists in your work in the description of the photo on the Pinterest Board. Links to their website or shop are appreciated. That way we can all find new art beads to love!

• From all the entries during the month, an editor will pick their favorite design to be featured every Friday here on the ABS, so get those entries in soon.

What is an Art Bead?

An art bead is a bead, charm, button or finding made by an independent artist. Art beads are the vision and handiwork of an individual artist. You can read more about art beads here.

***A bead that is handmade is not necessarily an art bead. Hill Tribe Silver, Kazuri ceramic beads or lampwork beads made in factories are examples of handmade beads that are not considered art beads.

Beaded beads, stamped metal pendants or wire-wrapped components are not considered art beads for our challenge.***

May Monthly Challenge Tour

The clean lines. The seemingly double-exposure images of the structures. The bright blue and white punctuated by the deep wine red. The shapes of the rectangle windows. All wonderful inspiration for May.

Let's see what inspired you.....


Looking forward to seeing your creativity in June!

Your turn! If you created a blog post, link it up here. (Sorry for the delay....)

An InLinkz Link-up

Get the InLinkz code for your blog! get the InLinkz code

May Monthly Challenge

"On a Shaker Theme", 1956

by Charles Sheeler

oil on canvas

23" x 29 1/8" (58.42 x 73.98 cm)

About the Art

Showing his deep respect for Shaker design, Sheeler wrote, “The Shaker communities, in the period of their greatest creative activity, have given us abundant evidence of their profound understanding of utilitarian design in their architecture and crafts. They understood and convincingly demonstrated that rightness of proportion in a house or a table, with regard for efficiency in use, made embellishment superfluous,” (Quoted in Constance Rourke, “Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition,” New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1938). Sheeler probably started collecting Shaker pieces in the 1920s, and began to include his Shaker furniture in paintings of domestic interiors such as “Interior” (1926, Whitney Museum of American Art). In 1934, he visited the Shaker villages in Hancock, Massachusetts and in New Lebanon, New York, where he photographed the Second Meeting House. In the same year he painted his first oil of Shaker architecture, “Shaker Buildings” (private collection), a rendering of the laundry and machine shop in Hancock, which he was to portray in three more paintings, including “On a Shaker Theme.”
The laundry and machine shop is a three and one half story building constructed in 1790. The structure served as a washhouse, machine house, herb and seed room, and woodshed and thus it exemplified the Shaker principle of maximum utility (Mary Jane Jacob, “The Impact of Shaker Design on the Work of Charles Sheeler,” unpublished M.A. thesis, 1976, quoted in Flo Morse, “The Shakers and the World’s People,” New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980, p. 138). Over time and subsequent renovations it had acquired a unique shape. Two additions to the original building created interesting relationships of structural angles and forms that especially appealed to Sheeler. He depicted the building a second time in 1941 in “Shaker Detail” (The Newark Museum), showing a closer view but from the same angle as in his 1934 “Shaker Buildings.” His final two paintings of the laundry and machine shop are the Museum’s painting and “On a Shaker Theme #2” (Babcock Galleries), both composite images painted in 1956. While the first two pictures of the laundry and machine shop are straightforward representations, in the last two paintings, Sheeler interpreted the Shaker architecture in his late style, which employs more abstracted forms.
In 1946, Sheeler had begun to experiment with composite photography as a basis for his paintings. He superimposed photographic negatives, sometimes reversing them, to arrive at evocative compositions. In “On a Shaker Theme,” Sheeler overlaid two images, one slightly smaller and in reverse, of the portion of the laundry and machine shop depicted in “Shaker Detail.” He also radically simplified the details of the building so that windows and doors are reduced to rectangles. Sheeler’s method of overlapping images resulted in a complicated scaffolding of diagonals and verticals. “On a Shaker Theme” celebrates the refined geometric forms that underlie Shaker design, although its compositional intricacy eschews the Shaker virtues of purity and simplicity. This complexity, however, becomes integral to the piece if we consider the title of the painting to be musical - Sheeler had used musical titles starting in 1940 with “Fugue” [40.780] - as in Brahms’s “Variations on a Theme by Haydn.” Some of Brahms’s variations on a simple theme become quite complex with the addition of contrasting but parallel melodic lines played along with the theme. Thus Sheeler took the simple geometric shapes that he admired in Shaker architecture as his theme, and by using composite photography created an intricate tribute to a beloved building.
mfa.org, source

About the Artist

The American modernist Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) explored the relationships between photography, film, and more traditional media such as painting and drawing with more rigor and intellectual discipline than perhaps any other artist of his generation. As in a well-conceived scientific experiment, Sheeler used his own photographs and film stills as the basis for paintings and drawings, thus crystallizing the differences and similarities between them. Works in one medium manage to function as independent objects while also being inextricably linked to works in other media.
During Sheeler's lifetime the essential role that photography played in his creative process was often criticized or obscured because the medium's legitimacy as an art form remained controversial. In 1931 Sheeler himself — wary of being accused of simply copying his photographs, and at the behest of his dealer, Edith Halpert — began downplaying their connections. Yet the complex dialogue Sheeler forged among various techniques early in the century is one of his most innovative and important contributions to the history of American modernism.
Sheeler was trained at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia from 1900 to 1902. He then enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1903 to 1906, where he learned an impressionistic style under the tutelage of the painter William Merritt Chase. In early 1909, on a trip to Paris, he encountered the revolutionary works of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and other European modernists. Recognizing the break with the past that these artists represented, he returned to the United States determined to cast aside his previous conceptions of art and pursue a new direction in his work. Around 1910 Sheeler took up photography as a way to support his painting — first documenting buildings for local Philadelphia architects, and later photographing works of art for New York dealers. In 1913 he participated in the first comprehensive display of European and American modernism in the United States, the Armory Show in New York, where he admired the works of the iconoclastic French artist Marcel Duchamp. By 1917 Sheeler was being recognized not only for his cubist-inspired paintings and drawings but also for his innovative photographs. Alfred Stieglitz, the influential champion of modern art in America, proclaimed Sheeler, along with Morton Schamberg and Paul Strand, the "Trinity of Photography."

Our Sponsors

Our Sponsors this month are Moogin and Marsha Neal Studio.

Please visit us Monday to see the prizes!

How to enter the Monthly Challenge:

1. You need to have a Pinterest account. Go get one ASAP if you don't have one already. It's easy, fun and inspiring.

2. Email us at absmonthlychallenge@gmail.com to get added to the monthly challenge board.

Subject: Monthly Challenge Board Request

You will be emailed an invite to the board within 48 hours. Accept the invite and you are ready to pin your entries.

3. Two ways to pin your entry to the board.

Pin your photo from the internet (on your blog, Etsy shop, etc.)

Add your photo directly from your computer

Create something using an art bead that fits within our monthly theme. We post the art to be used as your inspiration to create. This challenge is open to jewelry-makers, fiber artists, collage artist, etc. The art bead can be created by you or someone else. The challenge is to inspire those who use art beads and to see all the different ways art beads can be incorporated into your handiwork.

An Art Bead must be used in your piece to qualify for the monthly challenge.

***Beads strung on a chain, by themselves and beads simply added to wire or cord will not be accepted.***

Please add the tag or title MAY ABS to your photos. Include a short description, who created the art beads and a link to your blog, if you have one.

Deadline is May 31st 

You may upload 2 entries per month.

ENTRIES for ART BEAD ARTISTS!!

• Beads Makers Pinterest Board-Art beads must be created by you and fit the Art Bead Scene's monthly challenge theme. They can be made for the challenge or ones you have made before. 2 entries per month are allowed. 

One entry will be picked by the editors each month for a free month of advertising on the Art Bead Scene. Bead entries have to be pinned by the 30th of the month.

Beads only - do not post jewelry on this board. If a post doesn't fit the challenge it will be deleted.

Monthly Challenge Recap

• Please post at least one single shot of your creation on the Pinterest Board. This will be used to make a collage for the Monthly Challenge Gallery. Every creation will be added to the collage, regardless of a blog post. So everyone gets included!

Your entry must be on Pinterest 2 days BEFORE the recap to be included.

• Be sure to share with us the name of the art bead artist in the description of your photo so that if you are selected for the weekly Perfect Pairings on Wednesdays, both you as the designer and the art bead artist can get the credit you both deserve!

• An InLinkz button will be added to the bottom of the Monthly Challenge Recap post. Here you will be able to link up your blog post if you have one. It is no longer necessary to add your blog post URL to the description unless you want to. Be sure to hop around and see all the great inspiration and leave some comment love!

• The Monthly Challenge Recap with Blog Tour will be posted on May 31st.

Monthly Challenge Winners

• One prize winner will be selected at random from all pictures posted on the Pinterest board.

• One prize winner will be selected at random from all blog posts added to the hop for the Monthly Challenge Recap post. So if you want to be in the pool for the second prize, be sure to use the InLinkz code at the bottom of the post to share your process and inspirations!

• Winners will be randomly chosen from all the qualifying entries on April 1st.

Perfect Pairings :: Designer + Art Bead Artist

• Formerly the Featured Designer of the Week, our new Perfect Pairings will focus on both the jewelry designer and the art bead artist. 

• Be sure to point out all the art bead artists in your work in the description of the photo on the Pinterest Board. Links to their website or shop are appreciated. That way we can all find new art beads to love!

• From all the entries during the month, an editor will pick their favorite design to be featured every Wednesday here on ABS, so get those entries in soon.

What is an Art Bead?

An art bead is a bead, charm, button or finding made by an independent artist. Art beads are the vision and handiwork of an individual artist. You can read more about art beads here.

***A bead that is handmade is not necessarily an art bead. Hill Tribe Silver, Kazuri ceramic beads or lampwork beads made in factories are examples of handmade beads that are not considered art beads.

Beaded beads, stamped metal pendants or wire-wrapped components are not considered art beads for our challenge.***

May Monthly Challenge Recap

It seems that this painting, while intriguing and certainly not lacking for color or details, was a bit overwhelming for people to grasp. I read comments on Facebook and in blogs and elsewhere that it was something interesting but that the Muse was not striking.

I think that for me what I wanted to do and what I actually did differed, because I had in my head that I needed to make things as difficult and intricate as Lesage, when what I really needed to do was just focus on what I loved most about it: color.

I find it easy to be intimidated by the monthly challenges, either because I am trying to be too literal, or the inspiration is so far-reaching for me. Either way, I have set myself up in a personal challenge to make something - anything - based on the inspiration. It is the only way that I grow as an artist to take on challenges like this and find what speaks to me, even if it is just one tiny part of the whole picture. Sometimes when I am faced with a painting that I don't feel is talking to me, I will print it out and look at it from different angles, sort of like when you would hang off the edge of the couch and pretend to be walking on the ceiling. Or I might even cut the print into pieces and rearrange them, or focus on one. Try that next time you are stuck!

There were some really delightful entries filled with color and details and a pure joy. I hope you enjoy the gallery I have created to show them off!



May 2015 Art Bead Scene by Slidely Photo Gallery

Now it is your turn! If you blogged about your entry, please post it here for a chance to win prizes!

An InLinkz Link-up

Get the InLinkz code for your blog!

get the InLinkz code

Etsy Picks

How are you getting along with the challenge? I've heard a couple of people say that they feel slightly daunted by the challenge image this month. So, if you're up for the challenge but struggling to think of what to use, here are some suggestions. As you'll see, I've focused on the stripes and dots in the challenge painting and the first place I thought to look was Graceful Willow Beads:

Graceful Willow Beads

Joan Miller Porcelain

Selena Anne Wells

Nature Scavenger

(these sticks are actually listed as decorations but they are very like the beads that Heidi makes and there's no reason why, with a bit of knotting or wirework or careful drilling, you couldn't use them in jewellery)

Sandra Walton Art

Something to do Beads

Magdalena Ruiz

I particularly like this last option: 'It's no use: I just don't have the right beads in my stash for the challenge! I must treat myself to a set of wondrously intricate and beautiful lampwork beads'. Makes sense to me! 

Bye for now, Claire

www.somethingtodo.etsy.com

www.somethingtodobeads.etsy.com

www.somethingtodowithyourhands.com

May Monthly Challenge

Untitled, 1926-1954

By Augustin Lesage

Oil on Canvas

About the Art

Lesage’s patterns are unmistakable.  After noting the symmetry of the first large canvas, he began organizing his compositions along a central axis, building complex geometric structures in horizontal layers from the center outward.  An article by Christian Delacampagne quoted on Lesage’s Wikipédia article states (translation):

The first large painting of Augustin Lesage is one of the most daring in modern art.  Although not, strictly speaking, non-figurative (figures both architectural and anthropomorphic abound), it explores almost all possibilities of abstraction—lyrical as well as geometric—at a time when the latter, among professional artists, was still in its infancy.  They are no less ornamental and decorative than the works of Kandinsky, Lesage’s spiritual contemporary.  Indeed, is the distance so great between the the Theosophy dear to the Russian artist and the Spiritualism embraced by the French?  The former hearkens to Rudolf Steiner, the latter to Léon Denis.

About the Artist

Lesage was born in Saint-Pierre-lez-Auchel in northern France, and spent his early life as a laborer in the coal mines.  Then one evening in 1911, when he was thirty-five years old, he heard a voice underground that told him “One day, you will be a painter.”
A year later, partly through his involvement in Spiritualist circles, Lesage began communicating via automatic writing with “spirits,” including one he believed to be his sister Mary who had died in childhood.  The spirits told him,
  "The voices you heard were real.  You will be a painter.  Fear not, and heed our advice.  You will         find it ridiculous in the beginning, but we are the ones tracing through your hand. Do not try to           understand."
The voices proceeded to tell him which colors and brushes to buy, and where to order a canvas.  Lesage ordered a small canvas, but when it arrived, it measured three meters square.  He wanted to cut it into smaller pieces, but the voices stopped him.
For the next two years, he came home from the mines every night and went to work, letting the spirits guide his hand.  He began in the upper right corner and gradually filled the entire canvas (which is now in Jean Dubuffet’s Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne).  The composition was built by filling in small areas at a time.  The spirits did not let him evaluate the work in its entirety:  part of the canvas remained rolled as they guided his hand.  “It was like working without working,” the artist recalled.
In July of 1913, Lesage interrupted his work in the mines to do some faith healing; a move that got him in hot water with French authorities who charged him with illegally practicing medicine.  The testimony of his dozens of successful clients helped acquit him in 1914 and later that year he was deployed for WWI, where he continued to make drawings on postcards.
In the years following the war, Augustin Lesage was visited by Jean Meyer, director of the Spiritualist journal La Revue Spirite.  Meyer became his patron, and in 1923 Lesage was able to quit working in the mines and devote himself to painting.
Like the paintings themselves, Lesage’s position within art history is peculiar.  Though held in high esteem by the Surrealists, Lesage’s legacy is strong but obscure: of the 800 canvases he left behind, most have seldom been exhibited abroad.  English-speaking audiences are hard pressed to find any information on the artist.  (I just ordered a French exhibition catalogue from a 1988 retrospective.)
Augustin Lesage’s “classical period” is the period between 1916 and 1927, when he painted his most representative works.  A growing fascination with Egypt, natural forms, and the ornamental traditions of various cultures gave Lesage a newfound source of conscious influence, diluting the purity of his earlier compositions and creating images that appear more self-conscious and perhaps less directly inspired.  Lesage continued painting until failing eyesight and health forced him to resign in 1952, less than two years before his death.

Our Sponsors

Our Sponsors this month are B'Sue Boutique, Gardanne Beads and Gaea Handmade.

Please visit us tomorrow to see the prizes!

How to enter the Monthly Challenge:

1. You need to have a Pinterest account. Go get one ASAP if you don't have one already. It's easy, fun and inspiring.

2. Email us at absmonthlychallenge@gmail.com to get added to the monthly challenge board.

Subject: Monthly Challenge Board Request

You will be emailed an invite to the board within 48 hours. Accept the invite and you are ready to pin your entries.

3. Two ways to pin your entry to the board.

Pin your photo from the internet (on your blog, Etsy shop, etc.)

Add your photo directly from your computer

Create something using an art bead that fits within our monthly theme. We post the art to be used as your inspiration to create. This challenge is open to jewelry-makers, fiber artists, collage artist, etc. The art bead can be created by you or someone else. The challenge is to inspire those who use art beads and to see all the different ways art beads can be incorporated into your handiwork.

An Art Bead must be used in your piece to qualify for the monthly challenge.

***Beads strung on a chain, by themselves and beads simply added to wire or cord will not be accepted.***

Please add the tag or title APR ABS to your photos. Include a short description, who created the art beads and a link to your blog, if you have one.

Deadline is May 31st. 

You may upload 2 entries per month.

ENTRIES for ART BEAD ARTISTS!!
• Beads Makers Pinterest Board-Art beads must be created by you and fit the Art Bead Scene's monthly challenge theme. They can be made for the challenge or ones you have made before. 2 entries per month are allowed. 
One entry will be picked by the editors on the 30th of each month for a free month of advertising on the Art Bead Scene. Bead entries have to be pinned by the 29th of the month.
Beads only - do not post jewelry on this board. If a post doesn't fit the challenge it will be deleted.

Monthly Challenge Recap

• Please post at least one single shot of your creation on the Pinterest Board. This will be used to make a collage for the Monthly Challenge Gallery. Every creation will be added to the collage, regardless of a blog post. So everyone gets included!

Your entry must be on Pinterest 2 days BEFORE the recap to be included.

• Be sure to share with us the name of the art bead artist in the description of your photo so that if you are selected for the weekly Perfect Pairings on Wednesdays, both you as the designer and the art bead artist can get the credit you both deserve!

• An InLinkz button will be added to the bottom of the Monthly Challenge Recap post. Here you will be able to link up your blog post if you have one. It is no longer necessary to add your blog post URL to the description unless you want to. Be sure to hop around and see all the great inspiration and leave some comment love!

• The Monthly Challenge Recap with Blog Tour will be posted on May 30th.

Monthly Challenge Winners

• One prize winner will be selected at random from all pictures posted on the Pinterest board.

• One prize winner will be selected at random from all blog posts added to the hop for the Monthly Challenge Recap post. So if you want to be in the pool for the second prize, be sure to use the InLinkz code at the bottom of the post to share your process and inspirations!

• Winners will be randomly chosen from all the qualifying entries on May 1st.

Perfect Pairings :: Designer + Art Bead Artist

• Formerly the Featured Designer of the Week, our new Perfect Pairings will focus on both the jewelry designer and the art bead artist. 

• Be sure to point out all the art bead artists in your work in the description of the photo on the Pinterest Board. Links to their website or shop are appreciated. That way we can all find new art beads to love!

• From all the entries during the month, an editor will pick their favorite design to be featured every Wednesday here on ABS, so get those entries in soon.

What is an Art Bead?

An art bead is a bead, charm, button or finding made by an independent artist. Art beads are the vision and handiwork of an individual artist. You can read more about art beads here.

***A bead that is handmade is not necessarily an art bead. Hill Tribe Silver, Kazuri ceramic beads or lampwork beads made in factories are examples of handmade beads that are not considered art beads.

Beaded beads, stamped metal pendants or wire-wrapped components are not considered art beads for our challenge.***

May Monthly Challenge Recap

I have to apologize for the lack of a Perfect Pairings post on Wednesday. I have been having some technical difficulties this week accessing the Flickr pool. That and I was busy with the funeral for my 89 year old mother-in-law. A good long life. We can all hope to be blessed with so many years.

Our challenge painting for this month is the Capriccio Padovano by Bernardo Bellato. My mother-in-law always wanted to travel. She would have loved this romantic Italian scene. Perhaps one day I can travel abroad as she never did. This landscape with the infinite waterways, the mountains rising in the distance, the strong architectural details and the shape-shifting clouds makes me want to travel to this place to see if it is still standing. There is a quality of light in this painting that is at once soothing and energizing. There was a wide range of inspirations from this one painting, and each of them is a marvelous exercise in creative interpretation.

Your turn!

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May 2014 Art Bead Scene Monthly Challenge Recap.
 

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May Monthly Challenge Color Palette

I absolutely love this month's challenge painting, how about you? It's so warm and inviting.

The majority of the colors in Bernardo Bellatto's Capriccio Padovano are shades of blue and orange, with a touch of olive green here and there. This works because blue and orange are complementary colors, so they are going to play off each other and look a little brighter and bolder when placed next to each other.

The blues are going to range from dark to pale, and dull to saturated. Pretty much any blue can work here, though the darker shades (like the water and shadows in the foreground) have a touch of purple in them, and the medium shades (like the blues off in the distance) can veer a little blue-green, if you're following along faithfully.

The oranges, too, will have a full range of values and saturations, though the bulk of the oranges and browns will fall in the mid to light range of shades. Look to the buildings here for guidelines, and choose browns, tans, and oranges that are a little more red-orange or yellow-orange than true orange.

And if you'd like an extra color to play with, choose an olive green, but use this sparingly. A lot of what we see as green in the painting isn't exactly green, but more of a dark yellow. Because of that, you want to stay on the yellow-green side of things (versus true green or blue-green) if you do use green.

Have fun!

May Monthly Challenge

Capriccio Padovano, 1741

by Bernardo Bellatto

Oil on Canvas

19.3" x 28.7" (49 x 73 cm)

About the Art

Bernardo Bellotto's style reveals a taste for what is charming and elegant. He specialized in metropolitan landscapes and historical architecture. Often using a technique called camera obscura in order to achieve the greater accuracy of his urban views. Bellotto lived during a time of political unrest and social upheaval. The old social order imposed by greedy monarchs and enforced by corrupt clergymen was buckling under freedom of the press and an intellectual movement called "The Enlightenment". People were becoming curious about modern science, art and philosophy. Venice, Bellotto's birth place, was an enchanting city of canals, art studios, vineyards, wine, rich cheeses, magnificent cathedrals and a breathtaking marina. 
The Rocco Era 'The Art of the Aristocracy', rocco is derived from "rocaille" (pebble), but the term referred in particular to the small stones and shells used to adorn the interiors of grottoes. Such shells or shell forms were the primary motifs in Rococo ornament.
The Rococo style began as a backlash against Baroque formality and stuffiness. Unlike Baroque, Rococo is not concerned with religious matters or dramatic expression. The highly decorative art and design movement began in Paris, France in the early 1700s. The style is profoundly symbolic of the self-indulgence of European aristocratic rulers. Rocco manner is characterized by graceful, enchanting, lighthearted themes and seldom features anything of substance. Paintings are animated and clever, reflecting an impishly sensual daydream. 
Rocco paintings feature effeminate male aristocrats decked out in velvet, elegant laces, prancing about in high heels. Women are garishly painted sporting dusty, grey powdered wigs. The figures are tall and willowy, stylish and charming. The faces are presented as soft and rosy, effeminate and eternally young. Noblemen are depicted wearing feminine coiffeurs, rouged lips and cheeks, often sporting womanly attire. In a way they resemble modern day drag queens. The Rocco female figures are delicate and light; the faces, are childish and sentimental. The lines of the mouth curve in soft mischief or in a delicate enchanting smile. 
Characteristic of Rococo art was paintings of wealthy carefree aristocrats at play in make-believe settings. These romantic scenes depict luxuriously costumed ladies and gentlemen flirting, picnicking and playing music at gallant country parties. The background scenery is often a serene natural setting with delicate trees and sprays of roses. Colors are a profusion of soothing, light pastels. The Rococo movement was initially restricted to France, later spreading to all of Europe and above all to Germany. The movement continued to develop until the arrival of Neoclassicism which attempted to return to the purism of classical antiquity. 

About the Artist

Bernardo Bellotto, 1721-1780 was an Italian urban landscape painter or vedutista, and printmaker in etching famous for his vedute of European cities (Dresden, Vienna, Turin and Warsaw). He was the pupil and nephew of Canaletto and sometimes used the latter's illustrious name, signing himself as Bernardo Canaletto. In Germany and Poland, Bellotto called himself by his uncle's name, Canaletto.

Bellotto's style was characterized by elaborate representation of architectural and natural vistas, and by the specific quality of each place's lighting. It is plausible that Bellotto, and other Venetian masters of vedute, may have used the camera obscura in order to achieve superior precision of urban views.

Bellotto was born in Venice, the son of Lorenzo Antonio Bellotto and Fiorenza Canal, sister of the famous Canaletto, and studied in his uncle's workshop.

In 1742 he moved to Rome, where he produced vedute of that city. In 1744 and 1745 he traveled northern Italy, again depicting vedute of each city. Among others, he worked for Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy.

From 1747 to 1758 he moved to Dresden, following an invitation from King August III of Poland. He created paintings of the cities Dresden and Pirna and their surroundings. Today these paintings preserve a memory of Dresden's former beauty, which was destroyed by bombing during World War II.

His international reputation grew, and in 1758 he accepted an invitation from Empress Maria Theresa to come to Vienna, where he painted views of the city's monuments. Thereafter he worked in Munich and then again in Dresden.

When King August III of Poland, also an Elector of Saxony, who usually lived in Dresden, died in 1763, Bellotto's work became less important in Dresden. As a consequence, he left Dresden to seek employment in St Petersburg at the court of Catherine II of Russia. On his way to St. Petersburg, however, Bellotto accepted an invitation in 1764 from Poland's newly elected King Stanisław August Poniatowski to become his court painter in Warsaw.

Here he remained some 16 years, for the rest of his life, as court painter to the King, for whom he painted numerous views of the Polish capital and its environs for the Royal Castle in Warsaw, complement of the great historical paintings commissioned by Poniatowski from Marcello Bacciarelli. His paintings of Warsaw, later relocated to Moscow and Leningrad, were restored to the Polish Communist Government and were used in rebuilding the city after its near-complete destruction by German troops during World War II. 

Our Sponsors

Our Sponsors this month are Tesori Trovati and 5 Fish Designs.

Please visit us tomorrow to see the prizes!

Monthly Challenge Recap

• Please post at least one single shot of your creation in the Flickr pool. This will be used to make a collage for the Monthly Challenge Gallery. Every creation will be added to the collage, regardless of a blog post. So everyone gets included!
• Be sure to share with us the name of the art bead artist in the description of your photo so that if you are selected for the weekly Perfect Pairings on Mondays, both you as the designer and the art bead artist can get the credit you both deserve!
• An InLinkz button will be added to the bottom of the Monthly Challenge Recap post. Here you will be able to link up your blog post if you have one. It is no longer necessary to add your blog post URL to the description unless you want to. Be sure to hop around and see all the great inspiration and leave some comment love!
• The Monthly Challenge Recap with Blog Tour will be posted on May 30th.

Monthly Challenge Winners
• One prize winner will be selected at random from all pictures posted on the Flickr pool.
• One prize winner will be selected at random from all blog posts added to the hop for the Monthly Challenge Recap post. So if you want to be in the pool for the second prize, be sure to use the InLinkz code at the bottom of the post to share your process and inspirations!
• Winners will be randomly chosen from all the qualifying entries on June 1st.

Perfect Pairings :: Designer + Art Bead Artist
• Formerly the Featured Designer of the Week, our new Perfect Pairings will now focus on both the jewelry designer and the art bead artist. Be sure to point out all the art bead artists in your work in the description of the photo in the Flickr pool. Links to their website or shop are appreciated. That way we can all find new art beads to love!
• From all the entries during the month, an editor will pick their favorite design to be featured every Wednesday here on ABS, so get those entries in soon.

How to enter the Monthly Challenge:

1. Create something using an art bead that fits within our monthly theme. We post the art to be used as your inspiration to create. This challenge is open to jewelry-makers, fiber artists, collage artist, etc. The art bead can be created by you or someone else. The challenge is to inspire those who use art beads and to see all the different ways art beads can be incorporated into your handiwork. 

An Art Bead must be used in your piece to qualify for the monthly challenge.

***Beads strung on a chain, by themselves and beads simply added to wire or cord will not be accepted.***

2. Upload your photo to our flickr group. Detailed instructions can be found here and click here for a tutorial for sending your picture to the group.

Please add the tag or title MAY ABS to your photos. Include a short description, who created the art beads and a link to your blog, if you have one.

Deadline is May 31st. Photos are approved by our moderators, if a photo hasn't followed the guidelines it will not be approved. You may upload 2 photos a day.

What is an Art Bead?

An art bead is a bead, charm, button or finding made by an independent artist. Art beads are the vision and handiwork of an individual artist. You can read more about art beads here.

***A bead that is handmade is not necessarily an art bead. Hill Tribe Silver, Kazuri ceramic beads or lampwork beads made in factories are examples of handmade beads that are not considered art beads.

Beaded beads, stamped metal pendants or wire-wrapped components are not considered art beads for our challenge.***

p.s. If you have a blog, post your entry and a link to the ABS challenge to spread the beady goodness.