August Art Bead Scene Challenge - Sunrise

This month's challenge over at Art Bead Scene is based on the painting "Sunrise" by artist John “Jack” Savitsky (1910–1991). Read more about the challenge, Savitsky, and his painting by clicking on the link above.

Even though yellow seems to be the predominant color here, I love Savitsky's use of other colors to cool down that hot sun a bit.

I decided to use my little ceramic bird house pendant I won a few months back from Jennifer Jangles! I had been saving it for something special and this project seemed to just call out for it. 

I created a "sun" from a copper washer and copper wire that has been balled on both ends with the torch (a few of them also enameled) and an 8mm yellow calcite bead. Once these 2 elements were done, the rest of the necklace sort of fell into place...copper chain, dotted with smaller enameled copper beads in cool shades of seafoam and lichen, along with more yellow, plus a yellow and red enameled filigree bead.

I originally wanted to use the wire sun as the clasp, but was having some difficulty with actually fastening it, so opted for another copper washer, this time hammered and stamped, and a handwrought copper swan hook.

I really like the end result.  The bird house is more ornate than the long row of identical houses in the painting, but that is okay...maybe those workers drudging up and down the street had dreams of painting their houses in happy colors :)

All the enameling was done by me...I initially was going to enamel every one of those copper wire balls, but the yellow is a new color for me and I kept either burning it so that it was not yellow anymore, or if the color was perfect, it would pop off as I was wrapping it!  In retrospect though, the few that worked, along with some varying shades worked out really well.  I like the pitted texture of the un-enameled ones as well.  Hmmm, I think I see some earrings evolving :)

I really love these challenges, can you tell?