Cinematic Surprise

I was suffering from a bit of beader’s block recently, and I decided to try and find a little inspiration by watching a movie. It had to be something with plenty of visual appeal, preferably artistic, and something that had the potential to translate into beadwork.

Luckily, I have a pretty good collection of fantasy and sci-fi movies to choose from. I went over to the shelf, closed my eyes, and grabbed one at random. The film I chose was Constantine, a theological thriller based on the graphic novel Hellblazer.

The Inspiration:

It was very interesting to watch a favorite movie purely from an artistic perspective. I kept my mind and eyes open for images or ideas that I could use in beading, but I honestly expected to come up with something involving angels and demons, or perhaps ancient runes. I was completely surprised when a piece of artwork tucked into the background jumped out at me and said “I must be beaded!”

I have tried to find any mention of where these Asian lanterns originated. With no audio commentary to give me a hint, I was left with Google. Unfortunately, no one else seems to know whose painting or photograph it is. Although I wasn’t able to get a closer look at the artwork, I was still thrilled by the combination of pinks, reds and browns.

The Beads:

Finding beads for this inspiration was fairly easy. I just happened to have a really great transparent seed bead mixture of assorted reds, pinks and tangerines. Because of the shiny quality of the transparents, I went with a deep brown iris mix and white Ceylon seed beads to round out the palette.

The Beadwork:

Although attempting to recreate the lanterns themselves would have been a fun challenge, it was really the colors in the image that caught my attention, so I wanted to do something really simple that would allow the red and brown to take center stage.

A simple spiral rope - one of my all time favorite stitches - seemed fitting enough, and I used a pattern of lines with the red and brown beads. The white sits in the background of the spiral core. I picked up the red beads mostly at random, though I occasionally threw back some of the more orange beads to keep the necklace looking as much like the lanterns as possible.