High King Margo's Crown (in paper)

Oops, I made more The Magicians fanart 😬

Uh, spoiler warning for a show that's almost a decade old? But four of the protagonists get crowned in the magical land of Fillory and Margo Hanson's crown was definitely the best one- aesthetically speaking. Obviously, I needed to make my own out of paper.

Given that the crown is round, I had to trace it from screenshots in pieces. The front, the left side, and the right side. Because of the distortion from my reference photos, the left side wound up being waaay super longer than the right side, so I had this hilariously lopsided crown design. No worries! That's what Photoshop is for! I just squished things around until they were roughly the same length on each side.

Unfortunately, I cannot do math so I had to figure out the proportions by just... printing out my design (across multiple sheets of paper to accommodate the length), wrapping it around my head, adjusting the size digitally, printing it out again, and... repeat, repeat, repeat.

My collection of gold papers is pretty cool.

My favorite part of any paper project is cutting out the shapes. So satisfying.

Like, this solid sheet of paper turns into... this! This intricate, lacy design! How cool is that???

For the jewels I used one very fancy-shmancy orange-red-gold art paper that I got a decade ago and then this shiny green wrapping paper that came into my possession when a friend gave me a gift some time ago. I don't remember what the gift was but I remember the wrapping paper.

Both for structural integrity and to create a kind of contrasting outline, I cut out a slightly larger silhouette of the crown shape in black paper. This paper was the top, protective sheet on a block of Arches watercolor paper!

Ta-da!

I love how something can be so elegantly beautiful on the front-facing side and then on the back you see that it's just cobbled together with scotch tape and scrap paper.

My t-shirt had a big, noisy design on it so I was like, "Okay, easy fix, I'll just turn it inside out for these final product shots. Nobody will know." Except my big white tag is totally sticking out and if you know to look for them you can see the inner seams are also pretty visible. This is why I am not the High King and Margo is U_U