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| Keeper of the Earth by Marla L. Niederer |
As I continue to
work on Keeper of the Earth, I thought I would continue to share pictures of my
progress with her. I also thought I
would take the time to share a little about her back story.
As I mentioned in a
previous post, Keeper of the Earth started out as a response to a critique of
my work while attending the NIADA conference last summer.
When I work on my
art dolls I generally do not have a detailed plan worked out. They just seem to evolve into who they want
to be if that makes any sense at all.
As I worked on this
doll, along with some synchronicity, she started evolving into Keeper of the
Earth.
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| Keeper of the Earth by Marla L. Niederer |
As I mentioned in a
previous post, after my NIADA critique I soothed my soul with some shopping
therapy. During this shopping therapy
excursion I was quite attracted to some silk crochet thread that I wound up
purchasing and brought home. Mind you I
hadn’t crocheted in over 20 years but I just had to have the thread. Upon my return home I started brushing up on
some of my rusty crocheting skills. When
I completed the skin tone and facial coloration on my art doll with watercolors
I decided to do some free form crochet with the silk thread I bought to create
her costume. I really had been out of
the crochet loop for quite some time and had never heard of free form
crochet. It just started doing it on my
own and afterwards I looked it up on the internet and found out that it really
was something other fiber artists do. What
was interesting though is if you look closely to the top of her bodice you can
almost see a tree formed with the crochet stitches.
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| Keeper of the Earth by Marla L. Niederer |
As many of you
know, I have a very strong affinity towards all that is shiny. As a result I have quite a shiny bead
collection. It just went without saying
that I needed to embellish her costume with shiny silver lined beads.
The tree is a
powerful symbol that has been used throughout time. It has been used as a symbol for the balance
between Earth and Sky, balance with nature, balance within oneself. So, I decided to carry through with that
concept while creating her headdress. I
really wasn’t sure what I was going to do but asked my husband to share some of
his electrical wire with me. Before he
brought it up to me, in a synchronistic moment, he played with it a little bit
and created a very tiny wire tree shape at the end of one of the wires. I saw that and of course had to search the
internet on how to create a wire tree pendant.
There are several tutorials out there and they planted the seed for her
headdress. In keeping with the theme, I
found some semi-precious stone chips to add to the headdress as leaves.
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| Keeper of the Earth by Marla L. Niederer |
About this time I
was considering where to go from here. I
knew that I wanted some dangles to hang from the headdress. Of course at my watercolor group that week,
in another synchronistic moment, I was gifted with some porcupine quills by one
of the watercolor artists in the group.
I never used porcupine quills before but once I saw them I knew I had to
incorporate them into the art doll who now was evolving into Keeper of the
Earth.
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| Keeper of the Earth by Marla L. Niederer |
I did a little
research on the symbolism of the porcupine and found out that the porcupine is
a symbol of light heartedness, helpful to those in grief, but also a symbol of
protection, a symbol of the warrior. The
quills could not be a more fitting symbol to add to the Keeper of the Earth
than that. So after much time preparing
the quills, and concerns voiced by others on the safety precautions involved in
working with the quills (I do have somewhat of a history of being somewhat of a
clutz), I added them to the headdress and her earrings.
I then was left
with what to do with her hair. My first
thought was continuing to use something natural such as raffia. But as I played with it the raffia was just
too overpowering for the headdress. So I
searched my studio stash and found some moss which complemented the headdress
instead of overpowering it.
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| Keeper of the Earth by Marla L. Niederer |
There is still work
to be done on her before she is complete but her presence is already an
expression of the hope that someday with light heartedness we can walk once
again in balance with ourselves, in balance with each other, and in balance
with the earth.
Until next time warm
hugs,
Marla
In case you would like to learn some of the skills I use in creating my art dolls I teach both online and live classes.
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| Mardi-Gras Tassel Doll by Marla L. Niederer |
I will be teaching
Mardi-Gras a Tassel Ornament Doll at the Philadelphia conference. You can find out more about the class and how
to sign up here.
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| The Goddess by Marla L. Niederer |
I will be teaching
The Goddess at the Columbus, Ohio conference.
You can find out more about the class and how to sign up here.
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| Claudette by Marla L. Niederer |
And if you don’t
want to wait until spring to take a class, I am teaching an online class on
AforArtistic that starts this coming week called Claudette: A Cage Doll. You can find out more about the class and how
to sign up here.
