Project Description

Here’s a quick share! This one hasn’t made it to my festival books yet, since I have been hennaing, not drawing, all summer 🙂 But it WILL!!! Quite a few customers have poked through my Instagram seeing what they liked and pretty much every one who did picked THIS:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGh1qXFhc1C/…

And finally, for once, it’s something that is TOTALLY doable in a speedy festival / party setting 🙂 And, like most good things, it’s got a memorable story. I mean, not an elaborate one… but I remember where/when it was done, and enjoyed every moment of doing it. This was done for a Raven themed ball in the Berkshires 🙂 Everyone wanted pretty standard henna stuff (yay!) but I was intent on getting them to include either feathers or illustrations of Raven the trickster god.

I’d guesstimate this design took about 7 minutes. We had a little longer than your typical 5 minute speed henna, so I took my time coming up with an idea for a while… and then did some extra-careful planning of where the edge of the feather would be, Asha Savla style. You see, the left edge of the big feather is actually drawn as an arc in a very light outline first…and then the center bits of the feather are drawn in towards the center, starting from there. But mostly, the Asha-Savla-ness here is that I totally cheated and put down a guideline to follow, but you’d never know unless you were watching me do it, you were a henna artist examining the photo with a microscope, or I told you I did it.

Anyway… Feather henna designs are all the rage! They have been for years. But I think this is my very favorite feather henna so far. The asymmetry of it really helps it not feel static and blah, I think. And the fact that the individual pieces of the feather are sort of the same, but not exactly, and the variations in shape/size repeat in fairly unpredictable ways.