From The Roof of The World...

Theres nothing, absolutely nothing like a little inspiration to get you going. Today all I did was paint my latest butterfly person, that’s right, no mass production here, I only painted a piece already sculpted! She turned out better than I could have imagined and is like a little jewel when I look at her. I am so moved by her that I have put her as my homepage girl on www.thebutterflypeople.com, I made a triptych with digitally edited images of her.

This is my attempt at not only contemporizing the overtly embellished covers of 13th century Tibetan manuscripts, but also of turning my figures into a sort of three dimensional canvas to exercise my painting muscles for a change.

Check out the process below.
The beginning, a baked, red polymer clay figurine only 2.5" tall seated

I took the image of a Tibetan manuscript cover and sort of just imagined it was shrink wrapped on her so the lines though zig-zaged, are not really concentric, she is completely asymmetrical. After painting on the black lines, gray dots were painted within the lines. In this space inbetween, concentric circles were painted.


GOLD!
Now the fun part, GOLD was painted onto her face, and all areas near the borderlines already divided. A sun-like medallion is painted near her belly but even that is not central, I want her to be asymmetrical, this is important to me because if something is beautiful even though it is not the same on both sides (even) then it is truly beautiful.


Everything is further painted over with bronze paint, and all gold pieces are given false shadows since manuscript covers are traditionally carved and gilded. This is the finished product.



And to show scale, a photo of myself holding the rare jewel.