My main inspiration for this piece was the artist Peter Max. I really love Peter Max and his etchings as well as the colorful and dreamy landscapes he creates. I wanted to capture some of the colors and subject of his landscapes and combine them with the outlined, sectioned style of his etchings. I wanted my piece to be a very colorful, dreamland, psychedelic, graphic landscape with a solid flat colors in a heavily outlined design.
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When planning my piece I had a vision for a big forest of giant mushrooms and a path leading into this magical environment. I wanted a lot of differentiation in the mushrooms and I wanted the scale of them to be obvious. I knew I wanted to use a pastel color scheme and have lots of 70's hippie inspired colors. I originally had the idea to make it a poster that I could turn into a poster pasting piece much like a lot of Peter Max's work during the hippie movement.
I was heavily inspired by the rich and solid colors that were often prevalent in the hippie movement as well as Peter Max's work. I did not quite know at first how to achieve such a rich solid color but began to ideate and reached spray paint as a focus point. I have used spray paint in some of my personal art endeavors but I wanted to challenge myself to make a clean intricate piece using the medium. |
I used MDF board as my canvas to create a smooth and rigid surface to spray onto. I wanted the piece to be solid and canvas did not provide the rigidity I wanted with the piece. I bought all of my colors and the MDF board but I suspected I would need to heavily prime the MDF board. The MDF board is somewhat absorbent and also dilutes the color so its not as rich and solid. I started the process by priming the MDF board in white spray paint for 5 coats.
I started this project outdoors because of the fumes spray paint creates. However after beginning priming outdoors, I noticed that the wind would blow dust and particles into the wet paint and it would create an uneven surface. I move the project into my garage and left the door half closed after this discovery. |
The first step I took was bringing the rough sketch above into Adobe sketchbook so I could smooth out the shapes and lines and solidify the design. This also gave me the opportunity to use the fill tool and experiment with the placement of the colors of spray paint I had purchased. This was extremely helpful and helped me see how the piece would feel with certain color layouts, which I further ended up changing during the painting process after I had some visualization. I knew there were going to be some details like the eyes, facial hair, and flowers that I would have to add in after I had spray painted. I took the outline and removed everything I would add in post, to leave myself with only outlines of where different colors would go. This outline on the right was the one I transferred onto my MDF board in the next step.
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To transfer my design from the paper onto the MDF board, I went over every line on the design with a thick sharpie. I drew over several times and the sharpie bled through the printer paper on to the MDF board in the correct orientation as you can see in the left picture. The sharpie that bled through was not very solid of a line so I went back over the crude lines with the sharpie again to transfer the design solidly onto the MDF board as you can see in the right picture.
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I then began my painting process. I elevated the MDF board on an upside down bucket so that nothing was touching the painting or the edges as you can see in the top right. I then started with color and section number 1. I took masking tape and sheets of plastic to cover every part of the painting except for the number 1 sections. The final product was the bottom left picture. After that I proceeded to spray three coats of the 1st color shown in the bottom right. After the painting was done and dry, I removed the masking tape and plastic and repeated the same process for the next 9 colors. The lighter colors needed more coats then the darker colors in order to cover up the sharpie outline.
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Similarities
- Both pieces use heavy outlines to create the subject matter - Both pieces use rich, solid color in sections to give form to the piece - Both pieces depict a fantasy, dreamlike scene Differences - Peter Max's piece uses gradients and grains and mine is completely solid - My piece uses much more fine detail and small elements to contribute to the piece - His piece includes separation between sections and is more open while mine is a solid scene |