Raven Box

This box was a gift, just the box. My family knows me well. I love boxes! It is an empty German candy box. Ancient Asbach brandy-chocolates made from the river Rhine Rudsheim. I painted the raven on it this past Fall. I felt the box needed something more, perhaps a shadow for the bird. So it sat unfinished until today. I traced the raven and cut it out of dark paper, lined up the feet, and traced the shadow made by a sunny window. A decorative piece of wood is the finishing touch. My original intent was to list this in my Etsy shop...

until I discovered that my bead design board fits inside perfectly. This will make transporting and storing my jewelry in progress a lot easier. I guess that I need to keep the box now. Time to find another box to paint.

Raven Picking Grapes - Necklace

If I were to pick a necklace to represent me, this would be it. A raven picking grapes. There is so much symbolism in this totem animal for me, grapes just put it over the top. I just finished this necklace today and before I change my mind I am going to list it in my Etsy shop RAEvN's Nest here.

The raven is an antique locking brooch and pendant combination. The silver plating over brass has a wonderful worn patina.

Hanging from the pendant is a vintage cluster of simulated pearls.

The sweet antique metal button is the perfect accompaniment. The embossed hand picking grapes drops from the clasp chain in back.


Richly colored green jasper stones in a rosary style chain with three additional baroque pearls. The necklace has a sterling silver clasp and is adjustable from 19 inches to 24 inches. The pendant and grape pearl cluster hangs an additional 5 inches below.


Just hatched from the Nest!

Raven Monoprints

I recently finished these two Ravens. They are from a series of 7 monoprints. They were printed from the inked plate after several stencils had been made first. The backgrounds are opposites. One printed with images on an inked plate, the other printed with images removed from the inked plate. I cut out shapes, used feathers and string. The backgrounds were made without anything specific in mind. I had drawn a crow using the same technique as the chameleon. I chose these backgrounds simply because I had used feathers on them. It was really interesting how they seemed to fall into place with the design of the crow. Because of their placement I decided to make it look like the crow had it's feet on them. I then used colored pencils to to color in the crow and bring out and hide features in the background. In future posts I will show how my other crow monoprints developed using different backgrounds and stencils. This process shows a great depth of layers.