Behind the Scenes

I had the idea for Integrity floating around in my head for several months before I was able to go out and photograph what I was visualizing. Part of the reason it took so long to get this image translated from my head to reality was because of the shepherd’s crook, believe it or not! It was such an integral part of the story I wanted to create, and no matter where I looked, I could not find anything resembling a shepherd’s crook that was also within my price range (which is free, or pretty close to it).

So… my quandary.

 I figured it was time to get crafty, since I had already gone that route for the dress I would be using in the image. For the dress, I had found a king size lilac duvet cover made out of this velvet-y material at the local thrift shop. While excellent dress material, I shudder to think what it looked like as an actual duvet cover. I like to tell myself that I saved some poor bedroom from an awful lilac tinted fate.
So it turns out that googling “How to Make a Shepherd’s Crook” doesn’t turn up much (although, since this is now the title of this blog post, fellow crook makers will now rejoice when they stumble upon my blog after googling for just such a phrase), but I did find a tutorial on how to make a Gandalf inspired staff, found HERE. With that inspiration up my sleeve, I ventured to the nearest thrift shop and tracked down a candy cane Christmas decoration, then stopped at Walmart and grabbed some brown paper bags, masking tape, and a wooden dowel. Right now, you're probably thinking "What in the world? I'm not following you Madeline....". Just bear with me.

Once I got home, I stuck the candy cane Christmas decoration on the end of the wooden dowel, and, satisfied with the height, glued and taped the two together like so:

(Why yes! That is Hermione in the background. Nothing like a little magic while working up your magic. Ok… obviously humor is not one of my gifts.)

Once that was done, I proceeded to tear up the brown paper bags and use the masking tape to tape it around the dowel and candy cane. Like so:

Cue brown paint:

Now the original tutorial I was following just stopped there, but to me it didn’t quite look like wood (maybe if you were using it for a Halloween costume and needed something in a pinch, but I'm a perfectionist, and I wanted better), so I introduced some hot glue into this business. To me the paper bags seemed too much like…. well, crumpled paper, and less like wood that had been smoothed and shaped over the course of many years of use. So I used the hot glue to fill in and smooth out most of the crevices and crumply bits so that in the end it was more like that smoothed wood texture I was going for.

I then painted over the hot glue again:

So that's how I made the staff itself. However, I wanted to take it up a notch, by incorporating some of the culture of the model I would be using in the image. Kacey is half Japanese, and while I didn’t want the image to scream THIS IS A JAPANESE GIRL, I did definitely want to see aspects of that.

I wanted to include the Japanese Cherry Blossom in some way, because what could be more quintessentially Japanese?  And this is where I put in my plug for Amazon. Can I just say how awesome it is that I can pay less than $4 for silk cherry blossoms and have them shipped to me in less than two days? Technology these days, folks. So literally two days later I was able to dress up my crook just a little bit more and finally I was all set to take THIS picture:

Isn’t Kacey beautiful? I love working with this age group. So easy to direct and they’re still willing to experiment.

So there you are. A tutorial and behind the scenes all rolled up into one lovely (and admittedly quite long) blog post.

I hope you enjoyed!

Until next time.