Fae's Dreams Journal

Hello everyone! 

Today I would like to share my newest journal with you which I named "Fae's Dreams".

You all know by now that I do love making concepts for my art, so that behind each artwork is a story. This time my client had requested a Fae, but not your regular cutie one with wings, but a wicked one, a special one. 

Perhaps some of you know already, I am not very good with sculpting faces, and so I was very skeptic about this order as I felt like I will make something very average and won't be pleased at all and neither will be a client. But recently I have purchased a lovely set of face moulds and so I decided to give it a try. 

My client wanted to have a fae with the open eyes but my moulds all had closed eyes. I took the challenge and begun to practice.

It took me 3 attempts to make her face and you can see from the small picture that the first two looked comic and one of them had to deal with my anger management problems! LOL! Yes I smacked her with the fist and poked the face many times with my ball tool. Don't make the duck angry! Ever! Well I also did struggle to understand how to do the lips and really struggled with the nose. As you can see from the original first picture, the nose had changed drastically from the original mould. So I did add a lot of my own sculpting onto the moulded base, including eyes, eyelids, completely new nose, more volume over the eyebrows and so on. It was really a process, which we Russians call :"The eyes are scared, but hands are working!", meaning that I was petrified from where I am heading with this and I was very happy with the result of the third mould. The nose turned to be more like an animal one, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't do the normal human nose. Here, now you know all my weaknesses! 

Another cool thing about this project which I have discovered in the process of it's creation was how to make human hands. I know mine ones are far away from the realistic ones, but still I am so pleased with the progress as I never did hands before! So first I made one that was too small, then I realised that the palm should be the size of her face and made another hand that did match the proportions. 

The third cool discovery was when I decided to choose a labradorite stone for the project. I have a small collection of them that always grows as I like buying more of them as they run out. So while selecting a perfect stone I found one that had an amazing scene in it. You must remember the game we played on Facebook named "What do you see?"

So as soon as I saw this stone, the story was born in my head.

Please switch on your imagination and go with me on a journey to the forest, where our little Fae (a fairy named Fae!) lived all of her life.

Fae was a little tiny fairy in her forest world and her life was so simple and everyday was the same as any other day. But one evening she was traveling next to the river and she saw a beautiful man standing next to the river fishing. He stood right under a huge willow tree and the light of the sun, that was beaming through the branches of the willow was lighting him up beautifully. never saw a man before and she was fascinated by his size, how strong and powerful he looked, so she fell in love with his beauty instantly. But of course, there is always some drama in every good story and as you all get it, Fae and human can't be together. She knew it from the start, but she kept coming to the willow every day to see him no matter what. One day the willow tree whispered to her through the voices of the leaves. Nobody could hear it but fairies and as she was the only one there, she was the only one who heard it. The willow said, that she observed the man for a long time and that she has noticed him being very sad. Once the man was even talking to himself, as there was no one around, but the willow was listening. 

Willow had told the Fae that the man was very lonely and he carried a very deep scar from loosing a loved one once before and he had given a promise in front of the Willow, that he will never love again. When this was said, the willow cried and her tears started to fall down and few had dropped on the man, too. He didn't take a notice, but the Fae had picked one up and saved it. With time it turned hard and became as strong as a glass, but it preserved a memory of what the willow tree saw that day. Fae knew that she and the man will never be able to be together, but she was so pleased to have a vision of the man in the teardrop "memory stone" she had picked up under that the willow. In few months the lonely fisherman had stopped coming to fish under the willow and so the Fae was only left with her dreams and a teardrop of memories.

So that's the story! And that's the pictures of the Fae and her precious stone!

Thank you very much for reading, 

Love & Peace, 

The Secret of The Death Valley - Treasure Box

As many of you know, I love to work a lot with polymer clay journals and create one of a kind books. Though sometimes I like to divert from this route in order to create something very special. Some ideas just don't fit on journals any more and they are eager to break out of the 2.5D into a 3D space. 

This time me and Ashley were brainstorming about where does my art career is heading and I was feeling quite lost really, stuck up in custom orders without having much space to breathe and give life to my own creative ideas. It did happen like this couple of times before and he was always there to support me and push me towards the right direction. It's true they say that behind every successful man there is a wise woman. But I can also say that it's a complete Ditto! It works both ways as well! 

So while brainstorming and having a bit of a creative argument, as we both are very artistic minded people with strong characters, we came up to some sort of agreement on what we wanted to create. 

The plan required some good crystal hunt and so we went to my favourite crystal shop in London, Merton. I like going there as I never seen a place with more crystals anywhere else. I have selected a good set of stones for this and some other projects in future and I was very pleased with the hunt. You can see on the picture on the right the large beautiful labradorite which I used in this project. 

I started this project with a great desire and a wish to complete it, although I knew it will be quite challenging as I never worked with wire before to support the elements that are very thin and are not attached to the actual base of the artwork (like it is in journals). 

So the challenge was there and I think I had to bake the actual head 3 times before I actually attached it to the base of the artwork. Then it was easy and I was completely in peace about working on the base for as long as I could without baking it. I think the second time I baked the deer's head, I actually burned some antler parts, but it looked so nice, that I decided to use it as if it was supposed to be like this. 

It was also quite interesting to work on the actual background as I wanted to create a scene of the deserted place, where it is so dry, that even the earth is cracking onto millions of shingles. To imitate an effect of sand, dry earth, cracks and dirt, I have used a needle tool to draw the outlines of the cracks and then I worked around them, inside them, outside them and everywhere else with the Dots & Scratches tool to create an amazing effect of a crumbled hardened sand and clay. I do always use this tool for this effect as I find it's the best way to do it. 

As for the small thin and thick root-a-like strands, of course I used an extruder as I had to apply way too many strands.

I also very much  enjoyed working on tiniest details of this project like the little old snake skin on the back of the deer skull or the actual special feature of this journal, a tiny little iguana lizard with some microscopic spikes on it's back or the thorns in the dead branches. 

Unfortunately thought the majority of them just fell of while I was painting the artwork afterwards. Perhaps I should have used more liquid clay to support them. But anyways, here you can see how the iguana looked like before it was baked. It had so many miniature little spikes and thorns on it's face and back as well as it had every little toe on it's legs, nostrils and eyes. 

The actual idea from the very beginning was to create a huge Art-Necklace in a shape of a stag with very large and branchy antlers that look like two trees. The actual timber was supposed to be very dry and full of texture and the roots of these trees would go around the head crystal and would worm the shape of the deer's head. But when I started working on this project, I understood that it will be very heavy and brittle to wear, even if it's just for an artistic photo shoot and not for an everyday wear. 

I decided to use it for a treasure box project. I had these wonderful great quality leather boxes which I wanted to use for a while and so this was the time! 

The name of this Treasure Box is "The Secret of the Death Valley". I wanted to show that even in the most deadly and dry hopeless places, there always can be life found. So the thorns, branches, roots would symbolise death, thirst and where there are labradorite crystals, they would form a shape of a stag with antlers. A deer or a stag always meant to me something as beautiful as life itself. The symbol of a stag is always used in the most wonderful and spiritual ways, therefore in my mind it was a right symbol to use. Labradorite crystals do always associate with water in my head, so it was a perfect crystal to use. So, where there is death, there is death, but where there is water, there's always life. And all the living creatures are attracted to it. And this is the Secret of the Death Valley. The secret of the survival of it's living beings. 

So here is what I came up with in the very end. Enjoy and comment bellow to let me know what you think. 

This box is available for sale! 

Thank you very much for reading, 

Namaste.

The Spirit of the Forest

Hello everyone!
It seems like I am writing these posts one by one today, but you know me. I wether work like crazy or leave stuff behind and then have to start picking it all up :) Now is this exact time.

 This project has been a very special one for me as it was my first ever Kindle cover and then I realised I can do kindle covers too! Yay :)
I wanted it to look like brown leather as my client did send me the actual brown leather kindle cover. So it needed to match. Therefore I used Living Doll by Sculpey ( which is a dyeing dinosaur now and is not produced anymore...) and decided to create an wonderful, center orientated composition of a bird that is protecting the forest leaves with it's wings and is surrounded by all sorts of magical orbs, swirls and other elements. The main focus point is an absolutely gorgeous aqua-green labradorite crystal that has these amazing vertical lines that so reminded me of the pine forest. And so it goes that this wonderful highly decorated bird is keeping the image of the forest very close to it's heart.

I wanted to ornate the bird's chest with some wonderful swirls, aventurine crystals, little golden dots and curvy outlines. And I also wanted the face of the bird to be very innocent and cute, therefore I used a simplicity trick here.



To find a labradorite like this in supply stores is very hard ( at least I am finding it very hard) and so I kept this stone for a very special occasion.



Thanks a lot for checking in :) You can find 10 more photos of this Kindle cover in this JOURNAL GALLERY. Enjoy!

Love you, 

The Cuff of Purifying Energy by Mandarin Duck

Hello everyone!

I am quite excited to present you one of my new jewellery collection pieces - "The Cuff of Purifying Energy".

I decided to name this bracelet : "The Cuff of Purifying Energy" because it reminds me of a magical artefact piece and it was inspired by my love for labradorite crystals, starry dark sky with northern lights and beautiful, slightly golden moonlight. Labradorite stones are believed to have a power of protection and their magnificent transforming colourful ever transforming sparkle can easily make this crystal to be one of the most beautiful on the planet.

This bracelet is a part of "Ancient Stories" jewelry collection by Mandarin Duck aka Aniko Kolesnikova which I started two years ago and I still keep adding to the line from time to time. This collection is inspired by heavy medieval metals, little golden sparks of fire and beautiful semiprecious stones (for this bracelet it's labradorite). Pieces in this collection have rather different styles but they all are unified by black and gold/silver tones, different material imitations and shiny magical speckles.
This bracelet opens in the middle allowing a comfortable fit and it's oval shape makes it wrap around your wrist better, without leaving empty spaces and avoiding excess dangling on your hand. Hunting for such jewellery supply is always an adventure itself and when you find one, you feel very inspired straight away.
Very unique item, one of a kind (OOAK).

At the moment it is available in my ETSY SHOP.

Here are some more pictures and I am sorry that this type there will be no pictures of progress as for some reason I was so drawn into making this bracelet that I forgot to take couple of shots!