After Fest

The three day PA Gourd Fest was such a nice time and I am sad it is over.  I have reserved sharing photos of a couple of gourds I intended on entering into the competition.  Now that it is past I can show them to you now and tell you a little more about them.

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In keeping with the PA Fest theme of "mystical"; I decided to make a fantasy forest scene.  This one I titled "Fangorn Forest" inspired by J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings.  I took a little artistic liberty, I know there are no dragons and unicorns in Fangorn forest in the books.  But they could right?   I wanted the forest also interspersed with "real" animals I like to draw.  A little humor, the one Ent is shocked the flying squirrel just might land on his face!  

​This gourd is 100% pyrography with only a couple touches of white pencil to bring out the stag and the unicorns.  It was loads of fun to do!

I also made up a short video of the process of making this gourd, you can see it on YouTube here:​

Watch Here

This next gourd is more realistic but I titled it "The Dragons of Dúlamán".  The meaning behind it is the seahorses are called leafy sea-dragons, and weedy sea-dragons, and dúlamán means seaweed in Gaelic.  I had been sketching these by memory into a sketchbook, then worked a watercolor of them.  At some point I decided on expanding the design to work on a gourd.  I used pyrography, colored pencil, acrylic, and metallic pigment powder.  I also carved the bubbles and water foam accents.