Land of Keys is in my Head!

This whole key thing is out of control. ALL I DID was see a cool monogram key done by Aubrey Beardsley in a book. I am obsessed! Now everything has to have a key in it. My man Chris hooked me up with wads of vintage keys...seriously. I have skeleton keys, car keys, vintage keys, flat keys, OMG so many freakin' keys. I have been sketching them all over the place hoping to be able to make the basic shape recognizable, so then I can embellish at will.

At the same time all this key nonsense is floating in my head, I am also re-addressing my pile of geneology papers. I have all sorts of vintage photos from my family and I am working on compiling a book, a family history. The challenge will be to illustrate it. Why is this the challenge, you ask?? Because in this book treatment, I will need to reign in my propensity to totally warp out peoples' bodies!!! I will have to work on backgrounds and try to leave the main character of each piece intact. If this book is to have any historical value to my relatives, Aunt Diana has to look like Aunt Diana, not like a bird with Aunt Diana's head!!

As I peer into Lithuanian history, I have found that they have this custom of creating very elaborate iron crosses. They are most common, and they decorate not just churches, but also the tops of barns and homes. Poles are erected at the edges of fields, and these poles have crosses and other symbols on top of them. I am intrigued by this, and I am in love with the beautiful patterns. As it usually happens in my head, all these topics get kind of mashed up. The keys have turned into the Lithuanian crosses/poles and I am making images that are a cross between the two. (ha! pardon the pun!)

This is my first practice piece in this series. I wanted to put family members faces on these women, but I didn't have any printed out and at hand when I was working, so I ended up putting these random faces on instead. I love the saturn, it's my favorite spot in this piece.


The second piece is a companion to the first. I am not pleased with the lack of yellow in this second one. It's too late to embellish it at this point, so it will have to fly. On this second one, I started out with a Lithuanian pole, and I used symbolism from an actual sample. But halfway thru the collage portion, I tried to turn it into a key. Strange, now it doesn't look like either.