The Process Papers

I mentioned earlier that I'm doing an art challenge with some friends, and I wanted to show you the second piece in the series.  The theme was beach or ocean, and I decided to go out of my usual style of pretty pieces, and do something different.

My inspiration for this piece dates back to past ads for McDonalds' Filet O'Fish sandwich, actually,  The ad I remembered featured a fish singing a silly song - you can find the ad here.  I'm fond of ridiculously silly things so that ad stuck in my memory.    (The sandwich is one of the few things I'll eat at McDonalds).  I was inspired by other ads also.

The piece started out with me painting the water and sand.  I'm not the best of painters but I did my best.  I used a mix of acrylic and watercolor paint, blending the two.  I also mixed Golden's coarse pumice gel to create the texture in the sand to give it a more realistic look. That caused a few problems later.

Of course the first element I needed to deal was finding the fish.  I had several collections of Victorian engravings to choose from and enlarged them a bit for use.  I decided to color them with pencil to have them pop a bit.

After this, I winged it, deciding what to do as I went along.  I thought it'd be fun to add an illustration of an aquarium castle.

then I thought, what's an aquarium (or ocean floor) without plants

Then I decided on the placement of the fish

I hadn't glued everything down yet.  That's when the problems started.  It's difficult to glue paper on to pumice gel, so I experimented with various glues including gel medium, which didn't work.  I finally used Aleene's Tacky Glue which worked fairly well.

After I'd glued everything down, I realized the piece was missing something - a sea diver on the sand.  

And I added sayings - fish advocating that people eat chicken, pork, and beef, a plant demanding that people eat fish, which is also what the diver says.

I thought it was funny anyway.  In fact, the pieces makes me smile so much that I intend to do it in larger scale, hopefully better painted.  This was a type of piece I haven't done in a long time, and I'm happy I did something different than what I normally do.  The people doing the art challenge liked the piece a great deal, so I think it worked.

What do you think?  Should I do more like this?

later,
lin