Pretending to be an artist

Last week, my work had an Employee Art Fair. I saw the flier shortly after I got hired in March, and for some idiotic reason thought it sounded like a good idea to sign up.

Here's why it was idiotic: I'm not an artist. Yes, I'm a writer, and I happen to think I'm okay at that craft. And I can build things, as evidenced by my love of dioramas and Cindy Pon's SILVER PHOENIX books. But when it comes to drawing and painting and sculpting? Forget it.

So it was rather stupid of me to sign up for an ART fair. But I did anyway, because of the whole building/ hands-on thing, and I thought that the idea I had might even work out in my favor. My idea? Decorate bird eggs. Not chicken eggs. Duck, goose, and one ostrich egg.

So I signed up, and then started gathering supplies and ideas, and promptly waited until about one week before the art fair to actually start doing anything. Yeah. Told you I was a moron.

Anyway, since several people have asked, here are some pictures of the eggs I made. You can click on any of these pictures to make them larger.

Here is my table. It was HUGE.


And here are my eggs!





This egg is one of my favorites. The Twilight Egg-- it actually is lit from beneath with a portable, battery powered LED.

The Dragon Eggs: (Note: these came out COMPLETELY differently from what I'd planned, but then WH had the brilliant idea to call them Dragon Eggs. The man is a marketing genius! Or, well, an idea genius. Would have been a marketing genius if I'd actually sold any).

The Gnomish Dragon Egg

The Volcano Dragon Egg

The Blue Dragon Egg

The Red Dragon Egg

I made several rhinestone eggs. I wish I could take complete credit for these, but they were mostly just really awesome stickers that I cut and stuck to the eggs. Some of the gems I glued on by hand, but certainly not enough to feel comfortable taking full credit. Still, I love the way they came out.

This one refused to photograph. But it was the only one I sold!

The Fire and Ice Eggs

The back of the "Ice" egg

The back of the "Fire" egg

I only painted a couple eggs, because, as I said, I am not very good with painting. Here they are!

The Butterfly Garden egg

The "It's a Hoot" egg

This one is wrapped with acacia leaves, because at the zoo I work at, acacia is one of the browse plants we use for pretty much all of our herbivores. It's a good, well-rounded source of nutrition, plus it's tasty (at least to the herbivores). And everyone who works there has a certain fondness for this plant. So I thought an egg wrapped in acacia would appeal to a large amount of people. It did, just not enough for anyone to buy it, unfortunately.

And my magnum opus egg. This one is a real ostrich egg, cut in half. The top fits back on the base and is filled with cotton clouds and a golden sun.




















So yeah. Was it fun? Absolutely. Was it what I thought it was going to be (an event where I sold all my eggs in the first ten minutes and made back every penny I spent on supplies, and then some)? No. But I guess one of the first lessons you learn when you create anything is that you need to have some patience, right?