This series is about the most charming thing I think I’ve ever seen! As a girl who’s always drawing ideas in her sketchbook, I totally “get” the artist’s move to capture and catalog iterations of fireworks lighting up a night sky. But it’s the artist’s composition that charms me most. I think the juxtaposition of effusive, showstopping fireworks captured in a tidy (numbered!) trading card style is an absolute delight. I hope that somewhere, this illustrator has a yet-to-be-discovered cache of other illustrations: microscopic household germs, sneeze sprays, hurricane patterns, whatever. I hope there’s more from this illustrator’s sweet aesthetic.
For this series, I started with Golem Studio’s dotty ceramic lentils and let them do the work. These beads are not my usual fare, but they so perfectly capture the radiating burst of the fireworks, that I think they’re just right here. (And what a good challenge to work with beads out of your wheelhouse, right?) Vintage beads, African glass, sherpa “coral” glass, vintage rosary chain, and gold spangles all added to the fireworks look while a color palette of mostly black sets off accents of orange, red, and aqua.
