Theresa Somerset

Theresa is a graduate of Castleton State College with a B.A. in Fine Arts. She has an interest in painting watercolors, acrylics and oils. Her subjects are usually children within landscapes, and still-lifes with antique and sentimental objects from her past. She also works in paper mache, perfecting her own recipe for paper clay using recycled magazine glossies. She casts decorative bowls by hand, and embellishes them with metallic and iridescent glazes, as well as applying various types of metal leaf.

Her precise attention to detail has been touted as one of her trademarks. She is probably best known for her intricate Pysanky-Ukranian eggs that she decorates in traditional and non-traditional designs and incorporates into her still-life paintings.

Making a Ukrainian Egg (Pysanky)
Photographs by Jazmine Rodriguez

This is a wax-resist method done with non-edible dyes (much like batik).	1: First, draw the design on your egg lightly in pencil. Fill a "Kitska" (a tool for drawing with a reservoir) with beeswax.
	2: Melt the beeswax over a candle flame, and start to trace your pencil lines with the wax. Everything you are drawing will remain the white/beige of your egg.
	3: Next, dye the egg yellow. Draw or fill in everything you want to remain yellow. Hand paint blue and green areas with an old paintbrush or cotton swab. Wax over these areas to keep them.
	Then dye the egg orange. Wax everything you want to stay orange.
	4: Dye the egg red. The process continues until you reach your final color. This will be the overall background color for your egg (not need to wax the entire egg).
	5: Melt the wax off with heat from a candle flame, or in the oven at 195 degrees F.
	6: Polish the egg so that no wax remains.
	7: Finish by varnishing the egg for protection and glossy shine with Traditional polyurethane varnish or Acrylic Ultra-Violet Gloss Spray Varnish.
	8: Whew! That's a lot of work for such a small egg!