‘Sweet Gazpacho Girl’

Read about the creation of this artwork after the jump ...


I finished this piece yesterday and delivered to KickArts to go into consideration for this year’s Curator’s Choice Member’s Exhibition.  It’s the first time I have entered anything into this yearly exhibition as I have only been a member since the start of the year.  I wont find out until next week whether it has been accepted or not.  I hope so.

The image I used is from a photoshoot that I took part in last year with fellow photographer’s Rob Harris and Anika Betts with the help of Ashley J Makeup.  The model in the image is fellow artist Dove Raybould.  I had seen other photographers play with colour stripes across the eyes, candy lips and burying heads in amongst things before and wanted to try it and as it turned out I got to try all three at once.  It was really fun and this is perhaps the most conceptual I have gone with photography so far.  You can see another of the image from the photoshoot below.

This year I wanted to try a fully transparent version of a Storybox artwork using glass on both sides and decided that using one of the images from the photoshoot was the way to go.  I make these artworks by digitally adjusting the photograph so that I can print it out onto a transparency, usually to see the under-painting (or other medium as is with some of the Storybox Series artworks) but in this case having a fully transparent image so in this case I chose to use a second transparency which was another copy of the image but blurred so that all that was left was the colour.  I put the colour layer in front to soften the dark lines in the layer below.

Overall I’m really happy with how it turned out.  I love how it drinks up the light and how the box frames the image.  There were a few difficulties in the making, mostly the white of the frame being hard to keep pristine and earning a few extra layers of glazing before it was varnished and there are a few specks of dust inside that can never be removed.  With this I learn while I go.  As I move forward with the series I’d like to try working with scanned line work from illustrations  as well as continuing to work with transparency and depth.