How To: “Rock On”
Rock On
5×5
Mixed Media
I work for an amazing entertainment media university here in Florida and I’m partnering up with a few other faculty members to put on an art show with all 5″x5″ paintings. Here’s my first painting/collage for the show. It’s a mix of acrylic, canvas, watercolor, and pen…called “Rock On.”
I thought I’d switch it up a little an offer a little “how to” blog post, showing my process along the way. Here’s the process on how this piece was created:
I started off with a blank 5×5 canvas and used the funky watercolor paper that I created last week. The image below shows you the colorful sheet that I created by painting wet into wet. I started off with a full sheet of water saturated paper and dabbed paint onto the sheet until it was completely covered. I used sea salt (coarse Kosher to be specific) to create the splattered patterns. The trick is to leave the paper alone as it dries so it has time to take shape on it’s own. Once the paper was dry, I knew it was the perfect piece to create my crowd of people. 🙂
Then I started cutting out the crowd. I did a rough sketch of people in pencil and used and x-acto knife to cut out each person. I tried to strategically select colors as if the lights from the stage were shining on them; darker colors (black, purple and blues) for the people that were out of the light and lighter colors (oranges and yellows) for the part of the crowd standing in the light.
I continued to cut them out until I had enough people to cover the entire width of the canvas.
I developed the background (pictured below) by painting the entire canvas with black acrylic paint. Once it dried, I sponged on the white, red and blue acrylic paint to create a foggy/smoky effect. The last step was to add the gray and white stripes to represent the lights.
I used Mod Podge to attach the people in the crowd. I added the glue to the back of each person with a brush and followed up with a top layer of Mod Podge to seal them completely. (Mod Podge goes on milky white but dries transparently.)
I added the pattern to the sides with a silver pen and then used another layer of Mod Podge to seal the entire piece.
Ta Dah! One finished collage piece using acrylic paint, watercolor, paper, canvas, pen, and Mod Podge.