Monday, January 19, 2009

mixed media monday challenge

This week's mixed media monday challenge was to use both primary and secondary colours. For those of you that failed art, they are red, yellow and blue and orange, green and purple. I created this large (12" by 14") collage from scrapbook paper and heavy black cardstock.
To create this piece I was inspired by the work of the artist James Denmark. I found these images on a posters website. I wanted to try a collage that had a colourful background with the silhouette of a person in the foreground. Here are two of his paintings. You can surely see how these would inspire a collage artist to try something similar with paper.For my piece i found an image online of a torch singer in a jazz club. It is called Jazz Samba and is by artist Trish Biddle. I cut out the woman in silhouette on black cardstock. For the background i chose to go with the bright primary and secondary colours as per the challenge, as opposed to the rich neutrals in the original painting.
I found 9 colours of paper in my stash, which are conveniently sorted by colour. Unless of course they have specific images, like "floral" or "vintage". It was interesting to treat the colour spectrum as lights and darks, rather than using greyscale. Clearly the yellow was the brightest colour and should be used for the spotlight. But which is darkest? The blue or the red?
I threw in a few extra pages to have some gradation between red and orange and green and blue. The figure sits on top of the collage, much less cutting that way! Please check out mixed media monday's comments section for all the participating artists in this colourful collage challenge.

6 comments:

Jendy said...

These are great! I love the idea of using the colors to make the silhouette pop. Beautiful.

Beth said...

This is a wonderful translation of the original painting. Thank you for showing us your influences and the steps you took to create this delightful piece.

Julie said...

What a lovely post and such beautiful work. Just lovely!

Anonymous said...

Wonderful, Diane! Diane

My Creative House said...

Your work is just wonderful, love the way everything is put together.

Janny said...

Beautiful work!