Inspired by Rijksmuseum

Oh, these are the days my friend! It's again the 10th of the month and time for the "Inspired by" creation. And this is super extra special one - we have been doing these challenges for one year now! Time to celebrate!

But what is Inspired by? Every month wonderful Marsha and I choose a subject to be inspired by. It can be a movie (link), a painting (link)  or a music style (link). Then we make something inspired by that theme or a piece of art and share it with you and each other on the 10th of the month.

Do you still remeber the very first one? We took a stroll down the memory lane together with Marsha and she reminded me how the challenge actually came into being. After some "whatsapping" we now have a theme for the next one already and also ended up a great thing "to-do" sometimes in future... But to the challenge and creation for this time!

You might remember I visited the Netherlands last month. While there, we visited the Rijksmuseum and Marsha suggested that as the anniversary Inspired by could require something grand we might use the art found there for the Inspired by. We could choose any piece of art we wanted or even be inspired by the building itself. I'm really anxious to see what Marsha chose and what she created! Here's the link to her post!

I chose a piece by Jan Davidsz. de Heem called "Still Life with Flowers in a Glass Vase". I wanted to go with a flowery piece as I saw many of them in the museum and, quite bluntly, they really inspired me. I wanted to try to turn paper into similar shapes than in the painting. I wanted to mimic the flowers in the painting as closely as I could. In the end I did mimic several, but draw inspiration from the painting to others.

What I noticed pretty soon is that the simpler the shape or the flower looks, harder it is to do. I thought I would have a hard time with the peonies or roses, but they were oh so easy compared to the carnation and the tulip. I did several versions of them both before I was satisfied. Especially the carnation was a somewhat surprising hard. I just thought to make a fringe and turn it around a stem, but no, no. As I learned by looking the painting a carnation doesn't have anything to do with such a shape. It has got petals which are the more fringed closer they get to the center of the flower. The carnation is not still perfect, but after doing it many times, I was satisfied with this version.

For the rose, small orange flowers, red/white striped flowers and the peony I used Sizzix's "Tattered Florals" die. The rose contains three different sizes of flowers, the peony only the largest. White and red striped flowers are done with one shape of flower only and there's two different ones in the orange ones.

I cut all the flowers from white paper, assembled them and then colored them with Tattered Angels sprays. The white parts in the tulip and the red / white striped flowers are done with gesso. The darker areas in the carnation are done with Copic marker. Some of the flowers have stamen added to them. All the stems are covered with white flower tape. I colored the stems with Plain Jane mists.

So happy birthday Inspired by! These flowers are for you! 

Thank you for looking! Now hurry to Marsha's!

Materials: Tattered Angels, Sizzix, Talens, Copic