It was a challenge to turn Andrea Mattison's lovely fused glass suncatchers into a two-dimensional painting. I used Andrea's Prism Flowers, "Paradise" and her "Love Fairy" in this piece and I decided to use watercolors for the flowers so I could capture the light shining through glass.

It took some time to finish this piece as I have been away from home and caring for a sick grandma. I would start to sketch and then erase and repeated this process over and over again. After several tries I managed to sketch out some flowers and painted them using watercolors. There were no stems and the flowers had no order - they were haphazardly sketched about the page so I continued doodling and erasing. I finally came up with enough leaves and other bits but that left me with a mess of painted foliage and no design.

As my grandma's condition worsened I had to leave my work alone for a few days and in the end I decided that the only hope for salvaging this project was to do a collage. I cut out all the flowers and leaves and arranged them on a piece of paper, then I could finally see what I wanted to do. I painted a simple background using Golden acrylics, organized the cutouts and I was almost there but I was missing something - a fairy. I sketched out her face but no matter how I tried she would not smile for me. I suppose a bit of my sadness had rubbed off on her.

After all the bits were laid out on the background I glued them down using a Golden Gel Medium, then I drew in the stems and other little details with markers.

I have named her "The Modern Love Fairy...." because of her "mod" attire. This is actually Racquel Welch's body from a '60's magazine that I've changed from black & white to color in Photoshop. I added wings that I've tipped in gold and voila - my fairy.

This wouldn't be complete without a winged creature and Andrea's "Paradise" was the inspiration for my little blue bird. With the sun at her back her travels through this meadow full of prism flowers should leave this Love Fairy feeling happy again soon.

This was done using Windsor Newton watercolors, Golden acrylics and gel medium, colored pencils and markers on Aquarelle watercolor paper.