One of my all time favorite artists is Maxfield Parrish. He was an oil painter known for creating quite luminous colors in his realistic works through a technique called glazing. He was also quite innovative, creating techniques that have never been successfully copied by any other artist. His work is quite brilliant, and beautiful, so if you have time, do Google him and his work. You’ve actually probably seen his work already, as many of his paintings are quite famous–though perhaps his name is not as well known as some of his paintings.

The 2 magnets I’ve created here utilize small calendar prints of two of my favorite of Parrish’s paintings: Ecstasy and Reveries. I created these as part of the 3 Muses Artist of Choice Challenge.

Ecstasy

Reveries

What I did was take one of my old Maxfield Parrish calendars and cut out two of the thumbnail images from the back cover. I made slits at the edge of each figure with an Exacto Knife, and then I inserted photo images of butterfly wings to make each of them look like a fairy. On the Reveries piece, I did add a leaf sticker and a small bit of scrapbook paper near the top edge, because I needed to fill a gap since the image was smaller than the glass bevel. But beyond that I didn’t do anything else to Parrish’s beautiful images.

The next step involves copper foil that I use in my stained glass projects on occasion, and also an unlikely copper tape that is found in hardware stores: it’s Slug & Snail Copper Tape, and its true purpose is a snail repellent of some sort. But one person’s snail repellent is another person’s craft supply, I always say.

I used the snail tape across the bag of each calendar image. I had originally planned to solder these magnets, and copper foil is needed in order to do that–but copper foil isn’t wide enough for these images, as it normally in a maximum width of 1/4″. But the snail tape is about an inch wide, and since my magnets are around 2″ wide, it worked great for covering the back of the images with just a couple of strips.

After covering the back of the images with the snail tape, I took some copper foil and a glass bevel for each image and used the foil to wrap the edges of the bevel and adhere the image to it at the same time. The nice part about this is that no glue is necessary. And just to be sure that my bevel and image would stay in place, I turned the glass over once I had all the edges wrapped and then put flat pieces of copper foil on the back near each edge, overlapping the copper snail tape, so that it would be secure.

The last step was to add a magnet and some gold organdy ribbon to the backs, which I did with some heavy duty glue. I’ll just add that I didn’t solder these pieces because once I saw the copper foil next to the coloring of the images behind the glass, I just liked the way the copper complimented the colors in the images. If I’d soldered, the copper would have become silver in color, and while I do love that look, I think the copper was a much better aesthetic choice for these pieces. And they’re going on my refrigerator, because you can never have too many pretty magnets there.