Because years ago I did a series of what I called epistories, long banners with collaged rocks from national geographic magazines, this series is called Epi box (because I have been collaging on boxes, still using national geographic rocks photos).
This one has come a long way – see Epiboxes and Epibox 2. I think it’s now done. The final layers happened in the few weeks: Last week I added a layer of colour with paint, mostly blue and red. they are glazes, so the underlayers still show. Then last night I made a stencil on the cricut, which was originally inspired by pattern paper (ooh, says I, what if i made a template like pattern paper has, but that doesn’t obscure or change the colours of the layers beneath?).
It went a little crooked (i forgot to group the objects on the cricut bed, so cricut lined them up for me). it worked out, because the curved bits were still there, and that was the important part! I added the words Maximum Joy, because it came to mind, and it was long.
I added the stencil in pale yellow, and then a few in pale blue, while watching Ride like a Girl on netflix. And then i outlined the stencil to give cleaner lines (maybe next time I’ll remember that stencils are never clean). It did what i needed, which was bring back lights into the image, but i wasn’t happy with the bottom corner which was a dark blue. I discovered my stash of gold and silver crayons (twistables, i use them at work, but never grey or silver). This morning i added a layer of hair spray to hopefully seal the crayon in, because it’s water soluble crayon, and will probably brush off i imagine. We’ll see.
i have hung it in my lounge room – it’s large, and the fact that it’s made from a bicycle box makes it a large object – the sides are probably 20cm deep. It needs good light, and i’ll live with it for a while.
The whole piece is paper, ink, crayon, collage on cardboard – 90 x 160 x 22 cm
