Hella Sjolund: Twinkle, Twinkle Little Bat....

Featured Artist: Hella Sjolund
Blog Home:  Hella Bella      Post: [Swedish | English]
Location: Sweden

When Sue Roddis of Jabberwocky emailed me the link to Hella's blog post, I laughed out loud. I think this free-standing piece featuring the Mad Hatter, White Rabbit, and Cheshire Cat will make you smile too! Take a look at Hella's WONDERful batty bit of WONDERLAND:

Click any image to enlarge.



 Hella started with three layers of corrugated cardboard cut into circles and stacked. The top was covered with a piece of textured card stock and the edges of the stacked discs were wrapped with flocked velvet diamond-patterned paper. The tree is supported by a wooden skewer poked through the cardboard layers, and the other figures are supported by "L" brackets made of cardstock. All images are Stampotique. 

The Mad Hatter is a combination of two stamps, one for the figure and another for the hat!

I love the added details of the pleated ruff and the hair! Notice the spade made of the textured card stock and how the watch has been added. 

And this cat looks suitably "Cheshire" to me!

I like the detail of the curled ends, one curled up and one down, which turns the sentiment panel into a scroll

 

I love it that it is taken from the song in the mad tea party scene:

"Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you're at!"

You know the song, perhaps?'

`I've heard something like it,' said Alice.

`It goes on, you know,' the Hatter continued, `in this way:--

"Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea-tray in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle--"'

-- Chapter 7, Alice in Wonderland

  So of course we need a BAT!

I hope you are smiling too!  This Halloween scene is so full of whimsy and creativity that I could not resist sharing it with you. The color palette, limited to black, gray, white, orange and purple, adds a great sense of unity to all the disparate images and lends a spooky mood to the whole thing. I would not have been able to resist adding lots of color, particularly to the Mad Hatter, so I admire Hella's restraint with color all the more as it makes the piece much stronger.

I also admire the way Hella used very simple, readily available materials to create such a wonderful free-standing scene. While the figures are all still two dimensional and the piece is designed to be viewed from one direction, the impact of the depth added by this construciton technique is quite amazing. Most of us, if we had imagined this scene, would have used masking or layering to composite these images into a flat creation such as a card, art journal or some kind of wall art. Hella's move into a three-dimensional presentation really sets this piece way apart from the pack! Great job Hella!

Please visit Hella Bella (see the links at the top of this post) and leave her some love! Hella lists all the stamps used by both name and number. They are so quirky and really suited to this mad scene!

And please leave a comment here to let me know if you like Hella's scene as much as I do!