My new collage series inspired by The Office is definitely going to be a fun series to tackle. This is my second portrait in the series, and it had to be Dwight (played by Rainn Wilson) since he was one of my favorite characters from the show.
Portraiture continues to be a subject matter that’s outside my comfort zone, especially when it comes to sharing my work online. If I’m making a portrait of a well known figure, there’s even more scrutiny about whether or not my portrait looks like that person. And honestly, that scrutiny makes me nervous. So working on portraits over the course of several months has slowly taught me how to be okay with depicting portraits my own way. After all, I’m not a photorealist, my works are illustrations. I’m depicting my work with my own style, my own vision, and that doesn’t always mesh with how things appear in real life.
The other day I decided to work on a capybara collage, inspired by a trending song that’s been going around online. I never realized how tricky it is to make a capybara portrait. At times, it felt like this collage just looked like a blob, so I had to make an effort to focus on the texture of the capybara’s fur as well as the shadows and highlights on it’s face and body. At first the water consisted of a number of fragments of photographs of water from magazines, but they didn’t look very cohesive, so I ended up collaging the texture of water from only a couple of similar images. Overall, this was a fun yet challenging animal portrait, and quite a bit different than the types of animals I’ve collaged in the past.
Lately I’ve been pretty busy with a number of things outside of art-making. This year I’m planning to run the NYC marathon, along with a couple of half marathons, so life has consisted of a lot of running and working out. Thus this month I didn’t get around to completing many collages. “Michael Scott” is the only collage that I completed this month, and it was inspired by The Office. I’m planning to make a few more portraits in this series, although my next piece will be an animal portrait inspired by a song that I heard the other day.
Portraiture continues to be a challenge for me, but I’m determined to get to a place where I’m as comfortable making portraits as I am with animal portraits. We shall see how long that takes…
Earlier this month, I heard from a teacher, Annette, from Cambridge, Ontario, Canada, whose students took inspiration from my art to make their own collages. This grade 6 class did a lovely job of creating their own compositions. Collage can be a tricky medium to work in when you’re tackling it for the first few times, and these students did a wonderful job with it.
Above you can see a collection of the student work. It’s fun to see how different artists have their own unique style.
I enjoyed seeing how some of the students worked with fragments of texture and colors as well as combining cutouts of images like the dolphins pictured above.
The collage process involves a lot of patience, and again, I’m very impressed seeing the different imagery that the class created.
I hope the students had a lot of fun with these – it was definitely fun taking a look at so many colorful scenes. It made my day seeing some new, student work – and I hope they continue to make collages in the future.
The challenge with portraiture is getting the likeness of the subject down properly. The past couple of months I’ve been focusing on portraiture, and I definitely feel rusty with this type of work. It also hasn’t come easy, so I’m doing my best these days to strive to improve and get better as an artist, especially with subjects that are a struggle. I’m looking forward to continuing to improve and get faster at this type of work (at the moment it’s slow going).
This portrait of Wednesday was inspired by the new show on Netflix. Lately I’ve been inspired to make illustrations of well known figures from the media, and I’m having a lot of fun exploring different characters. It’s been fun creating my own version of these characters.
This is the tenth portrait I’ve completed in my Stranger Things-inspired collage series. I’ve really enjoyed illustrating a number of characters from the show, and now I’m ready to move on to a new series. I’ll have to revisit this one in the future to add more characters, but for now, this is the final piece.
I had a lot of fun with this portrait and managed to complete it over the course of a few days. I’m a little surprised at how many portraits I’ve managed to complete this month. Life outside of art has been pretty busy, so I’m doing my best to make time for art. And again, this collage involved using fragments of images of jeans for her jacket, as well as fragments of photographs of hair for her hair. I also used the same texture for the background that I’ve been using for a number of the portraits in this series. The remainder of the piece involved layering a variety of solid colors.
And now I’m off to sketch out a portrait for my next collage…
I’m getting closer to finishing up my Stranger Things inspired portrait series for the time being. I’m planning to make one more piece, before I set this series aside for a little bit. I recently completed this collage this past weekend. Again, I focused more on using solid colors. Even though this collage came together relatively quickly (when compared to other portraits in the series), it felt like it was a bit of a struggle.
I suppose that’s why they call art a “practice.” I’m constantly practicing my craft. In many ways my collages never truly feel finished, since I’m constantly striving to improve and grow with my work.
“Erica Sinclair,” Collage on paper, 7″x5″ Order a print
It’s a New Year, which means it’s time for some new art. This is the first collage I’ve completed this year, and I’m still working my way through my Stranger Things collage portrait series. I think I’ll do at least three more before I move on to another series.
I had a lot of fun working on this piece. Erica is one of my favorite characters and I enjoyed working primarily with solid colors to complete this one – focusing a lot on different shadows and highlights. I especially like her colorful outfit.
Anyway, I hope everyone had a happy holiday! I’m looking forward to another year filled with art-making and adventure.
When I frame my collages, I like to use a UV-protective frame and acid-free mat board. Using acid-free materials for framing helps prevent discoloration of the original artwork from other materials that are overlapping the art from framing, such as mat boards or backing materials. UV-protective frames also help protect the original artwork from sunlight, which can cause fading and discoloration. In general, I recommend hanging artwork that’s on paper or made from paper out of direct sunlight whenever possible (to further protect the art).
I generally work in standard sizes for my artwork, which makes it easier for clients to frame the artwork themselves. The artwork in my online store is sold unframed (although I can frame pieces on request), and since most of my original artwork fits standard frames, it makes it easier for customers to order their own frames online. The trick to finding the right frame, is looking for frames that use acid-free mats and are UV-protective. I’ve previously used Nielsen Bainbridge frames, although you can also find other UV-protective options as well.
Back in 2011, I wrote and illustrated my first children’s book, Duck & Fish. When I was in college, I studied painting and creative writing, and had taken a hiatus from creative writing once I graduated from college. However, I was inspired to pick up writing again for this project after a number of people said that they’d love to see me write and illustrate a children’s book. So I suppose you could say I was inspired to write and illustrate a children’s book after enough people had asked me if I had ever thought about doing just that. I also liked the idea of merging together my two interests in art and writing into a project – thus, I decided to give it a try and tackle my first book.
I remember the project was pretty time-consuming since I put all my other collage work on hold as I began work on about 30 collage illustrations. It took me several months that year to complete all the illustrations after I had storyboarded out how I wanted things to look and had already completed the first draft of the text. I had a couple of friends proof-read my work and provide feedback. And as I finalized the illustrations, I worked on finalizing the copy.
When the text and artwork were complete, I photographed my collages, and decided on using Blurb for self-publishing my work. I didn’t want to wait on finding a publisher since I was eager to have my book readily available. However, after several years passed, I realized Blurb wasn’t very accessible to others who were interested in buying my book. In fact, the cost of printing a book was so high, that I could barely mark up the price at all to make a profit (I was making about $1 per book that sold when they were costing around $30 to print). Recently, I worked on reformatting my book to have it available on Amazon and Apple Books at a much more affordable price, and since it’s now on two popular platforms, it’s a lot easier to find.
Will I make another children’s book in the future? At this point, I like the idea of making another one, although I keep remembering how time-consuming the Duck & Fish book was to illustrate, so at the moment, I don’t think I’m ready to dive into another one just yet. I might actually explore writing a book about the creative process in the not so distant future.
