The birthstone of December is Turquoise and the flower is the white narcissus. I’ve actually done prior research into the structure of this flower for the Advent Angel piece created for my Spirits of Winter series, who was actually the prototype birthstone image I did before I switched to the Ladies of the Months’ rectangular format instead.
Mood Board
The funny thing about white narcissus is that they share a lot in common structurally with daffodils, being a variant of a similar plant, so I had some warm up with this flower already thanks to March’s mask and the aforementioned Advent Angel. I love the way the corona of petals overlap to give this flower its unique shape! I decided to go with the more rounded star-shaped for this mask, since I like the simplicity of it, which is much easier to carve.
Design
I was actually pretty happy with my first try at this design. The flowers have elegant sweeping stem structures that fill up the space nicely with the bunches of blooms in the middle, crowning the mask in a balanced way.
Process Shots
Here are some shots of the mask during the tooling phase and after it was baked and hardened. I’ve tried something different with the tooling for this flower by adding many thin lines in the petals with a stylus to give it a delicate textured feel. This is actually the same technique I’ve used to add texture to butterfly wings in leather.
