Construction Paper Crown

Ideally, I would finish this project before sharing it with you but right now I'm killing time in the Emergency Room waiting room (everything's fine. I mean, it's not, but it's fine. I'm here for somebody else, nobody's dying/in pain, don't worry, etc.) so, like, why not create some #Content while I'm here for however much longer?

No doubt you've heard about the little Louvre incident with the French Crown Jewels.

I didn't even know they existed before, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about them since they were stolen.

My friend Clare (from this comic!) came to visit for a few days so naturally we stopped by the good Goodwill store (the big one!) where I found the most amazing 1980s blue sequined dress and I was like "oh my god, I'm going to be the stolen French Louvre jewels for Halloween" so I bought it for $20 and now I just need to make some historically accurate-ish jewelry out of paper!

To start with, I did a very rough, unsymmetrical shape tracing of the crown elements in Photoshop.

With my printer running hilariously low on ink, I realized I could probably get away with making a crown of just the front three motifs and save myself from hand-tracing the full six onto my black construction paper. The three will sit over my forehead, held in place by a (paper?) band running around the rest of my skull.

Then I went about cutting out the negative space.

I've had that textured, shiny blue/purple paper for literally over a decade. Possibly 15 years? It's just the one piece. I think a friend gave it to me? So yeah, it's lived in my paper scrap box all this time, waiting for just the right project to come along.

I discovered my old three-hole punch was very helpful in producing small little circle jewels out of my fancy paper.

Easily more than 15 years old are my metallic paints. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I definitely got them before 2010, because I remember using them on a project in the first house we rented in Portland, and we moved in there in 2010. So anyway, I filled in the rest of the diamond details with my very, very old (and well preserved!) silver paint.

Oh hey, okay! We're getting discharged from the hospital. Everything's good (as good as it can be) so I'm gunna wrap this post up and go the fuck home. I'll take some final photos and share those later!