Projecting and Collaging

Its cold outside! Pretty sure that there is a recommended lowest temperature for spray paint use, and we're below it. Unfortunately, I have to do most of my painting outside, fumes and all that... Anyway working on a really cool piece that you should see a detail of later this week. For now, here are some studio shots and a little more insight into my process... cheers!

After I digitally separate a photo into layers that will eventually become stencils, I print outlines of each layer onto transparency paper. This usually takes a bit of time, mostly because most printers are unreasonable beasts that tend to jam up, and they seem to have a thing against transparency paper, even when on the transparency settings.

Once my transparencies are printed, I hang the stencil paper on the wall and project the image onto it with this ancient piece of equipment. Using the projector and transparencies allows me to size the image more freely, and cuts way down on wasted paper and ink because I'm only printing outlines on a few sheets, rather than huge sheets with whole stencils.

I was ripping apart an Interior Design magazine the other day for a collage assignment, and found these pages with work by Shepard Fairey. His work has been a major inspiration for me so I was excited to find it in a random magazine. Definitely worthy of being saved on the studio wall. On the right is a stencil I made that shows up in my work sometimes.

Here is one of those times! I've been doing some mixed media work on canvases, collage, paint, stencils, marker, and some block prints. Its messy and confused, but I like it. This is a detail of one where the eye stencil really worked well.

Another detail of a mixed media collage. I really like how the loose marker outlines worked out in this particular piece. The photos are ones that I took in South America during the summer of 2010.