May: Mercury Rising

The finished piece for May is here! If you recall, the project for this month was “nature art” and the theme was “outer space”. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get the full project complete due to being under the weather for about half of the month. My original plan was to do all of the planets in proportion to each other, made out of different natural objects like the one shown here. Mercury being the smallest, only about 3 inches in diameter… Saturn was to reach a diameter of about 7 feet!

For creating Mercury, all of the pebbles and snail shells were collected and arranged by hand, one-by-one. The entire piece took about two hours to create and photograph.. and several days before that experimenting with various materials.

I chose the snail shells because they were similar in color to the surface of Mercury and lended to the idea of the its cratered surface. After trying several backgrounds to surround the shells, I loved the look of the red pebbles as well the coloring – which reminded me of Mercury’s proximity to the sun.

I still hope to continue this project throughout the year and finish the rest of the planets. I’ve really enjoyed the time wandering out in nature that this month has afforded me. It reminded me of how much I love making things from natural objects and how much I’ve lost touch with that living in the big city over the years. I’m very grateful to have rediscovered this and have come away with many new ideas for nature art projects down the road. For now, I decided not to beat myself up over not getting totally done. I’m very happy with how Mercury came out – and it’s a good start to an ongoing project for the future!

*st