My Queen

 

Today's sketch of the Queen Bee. She'll be built to fit an existing crown made several years back, from a jeweled top of a pomegranate, with a bright robe of flowers worn over her gold brocade bodice. Her ruff will be like the hairs on a bee's body and her compound eyes left enigmatically blank and metallic. Her scepter bejeweled with a cut emerald stone, tiny sapphires beneath gold fringes on her impressive abdomen.

A friend knows how I love Gardenias and always gives one from her garden to my husband to bring home to me when he visits. The last one had a little bud attached that became more of a gift than she could have known.

When it dried (below) I saw in its attitude and shape what I had been looking for for Halfland's Queen Bee puppet. There was something fabulously insectile about the way it had shaped itself. Even the gesture of the arm was regal. I'd found my Queen. A Halflandian Coronation.

The key element that had been missing was the way the flower bud had dried itself into what looked like a very tight >>>corset<<< over an extremely large bustle. Yes, it was a plant, my flower, but it suggested precisely everything I needed in order to visualize this particular insect with human characteristics better than anything else could.

The smallness of the head I never would have thought to do without it. Even the placement of the wings was there as was the start of a crown. This is another minor background vignette character and will be made at the level of the Twig Man. She'll need a small entourage of two attendants who will be made even more quickly and simply, being merely for symbols of the Queen's importance.