I’m blowing through the watercolor paper pretty quickly these days— big piles of discards with half-painted panels or random daubs of color. Sometimes the daubs are more interesting than the panels. So I’m trying out some collage work with these leftover bits. The first one got a little out of hand, but this crop of it looks okay.
Inspired by my recent visit to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. The background is watercolor and ink, with pasted paper on top.
I highly recommend visiting the Museum – it’s an attractive, friendly space with three galleries (currently showing: Tommy dePaola, E. H. Shepard, and Carle), a library of children’s books, and an art studio where kids and adults can make things. And probably my favorite museum bookshop ever. In addition to a vast array of picture books, they carry mammoth art books like Kramer’s Ergot 7, the Sunday Press collections of Little Nemo in Slumberland, Little Sammy Sneeze, and Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, as well as a smattering of other comics work. And right down the road you can buy dark chocolate peanut butter cups. Well worth the trip.
I got to sit around and cut out paper dolls for a few hours today. This experiment came out better than previous ones – these cutouts cast a nice shadow in a few places, which usually isn’t the case when the pieces of paper are sandwiched in the scanner. I’m groping my way toward some kind of effect here …
