Materials used:
- tissue paper collage, plain colours and sewing patterns
- cardboard baseÂ
- posca markers
- oil pastelsÂ
- twistables (white)
- Gensai Tambi watercolours
- black sharpie
- gel medium
- acrylic paint
I wanted a piece to go on my lounge room wall, something large. Which is where it is now.
I’ve been working on this one for more than a week, and you’ll see multiple in progress pix below.
The first one shows the piece which inspired this. But it is of course very similar to Karina’s Paris, in size and subject.
This one is 120 x 180cm. I made it on calendar cardboard Bronwen Black gave me around 2016.
I started with the plan to have tiny terraces, once per piece of collaged tissue paper. You’ll see them in the images, looking like tiny gravestones winding down a hill. Over time those pieces got larger and the piece required different sized pieces. I enjoyed the joy and vitality of those, and maybe i can go back and do them again.
The top right hand corner was a lovely piece all by itself and i miss it, because when I attached it to the other backing pieces I brought in more dark blues.
This was also an opportunity to use almost all of the coloured tissue paper i got from my mum’s stash when she moved house in 2010 or earlier.
I still have heaps of sewing pattern paper, but it sometimes feels too easy to use it, it always looks good. Not always, i guess, because on this piece it actually got a little dull.
I did add a “wash” of Prussian Blue (in the left hand side of the picture) and indigo (accidentally, and too much) which darkened the right hand side of the picture considerably, and meant i had to introduce whites and lights to try to restore the lightness
I also tried to remember perspective, and i have kind of done it in some places, mostly having larger houses at the bottom/front and smaller houses at the top/back.
In an attempt to add light I have been through with white and pale coloured markers to delineate houses from streets, I also ran over the streets with a soft white crayola twistable. And normal crayons too.
I’m already working on several others in this series, so watch the space. I’m learning and re-learning as I make.
Large pieces are hard, because even with an entire studio of my own, it’s not big enough to crawl all over it and make this.
The final touches I am literally doing on the lounge room wall as it hangs.
I woke up this morning thinking that I might need to link through a golden line somehow – I’m not 100% happy with it right now, so i can’t break it, right?
I’ll wait till i finish the others, in case I then want to pull it off the wall!!
