Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Monsters For Max


Monster M
Monster A

Monster X

Today is Max's first birthday and for his present, I made him a series of monster collages. That is the theme for his birthday party, which is to be this coming Saturday. Above are the finished monster pieces, but below are photographs depicting the process.

Here is the first step; the painted canvases. I chose to go with the three primary colors and make the monsters in the complementary secondary colors. You can see that I have some shapes made with punches. Although I chose to use the star shape, I later sent the puzzle piece shapes to my scrap paper bin. They were just too small for this project.

I glued punched out shapes to the canvases to add interest to the backgrounds. The blue canvas already has a layer of kinwashi glued over it. I got impatient and forgot to take a photo before I moved onto that step.

This is a photo showing kinwashi (Japanese rice paper) covering all three canvases.

Next I covered each canvas with a layer of Japanese ogura lace paper. I had blue for the blue canvas and yellow for the yellow. Unfortunately, I didn't have red lace for the red canvas, so I elected to use natural ogura lace paper instead.

Next I created the three monsters on newsprint using markers. The eyes are not really glued on yet. I just laid them in place to get a feel for the finished creatures.



Before cutting the monsters out with an exacto knife, I coated each with a layer of acrylic varnish. I wasn't sure if the markers would smear when varnish was applied. I was happy to discover that the smearing was very minimal. Here they are, happily at home on their canvases.
From this point, it was just a matter of varnish, gold splattering, glitter glue embellishments and adding the eyes to finish these "monster pieces"!


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

These are fabulous Kris. What keepsakes

Anonymous said...

Why, thank you! That's my hope, anyway.

Cindy said...

I think the red looks great with the natural-colored lace paper and probably better than if you had used red. The contrast of the colors really adds a lot. (Max is so lucky to have you as his grandmother!)

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Cindy! I think I agree with you about the natural colored paper vs the red. And I am so lucky to have Max as a grandson!