{Spotlight Project} Shirley's Inspired By Friedensreich Hundertwasser - Take One

Hi guys! For the next few Wednesdays I'll be doing a little feature on cards inspired by architecture, artists or art styles.

Disclaimer: I don't profess to know anything about art - if I like it, it's good art, and that's good enough for me!

I'm starting today with Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Billy Connolly had a TV series a few years ago, Billy's World Tour of New Zealand, in which he featured Hundertwasser's toilets at Kawakawa. So when we were visiting that region of New Zealand a couple of years later, they were on my "to do" list, so to speak.

That led me to find out a bit more about Hundertwasser, who was an Austrian artist and architect who rejected straight lines and preferred fluid, natural forms. He actually ended up living in New Zealand. I'd love to show you some of his work here, but I almost had to sign the Official Secrets Act just to get on the official website - linking images from there is frowned upon, so I suggest you just google his name, click on images, and you'll be able to see his works.

This card is based on Hundertwasser's landscape paintings. Here's a step-by-step of my process:

I started by stamping some of the outline shapes from the Retro Mod Shapes set in Versafine Onyx Black on to mixed media paper.

I added some solid shapes with Distress Inks, then added borders around the solid shapes and stalks with a Posca pen.

I coloured in the outline shapes with matching Distress markers, and coloured patterns on some of the stalks.

Then I drew some fluid horizontal lines across the design with the Posca pen, which is waterproof. (Actually, it looks cool at this stage!)

Once it was all coloured in, I trimmed the panel then tried it against different coloured base cards: red, green, yellow, blue. Red is already too dominant, yellow and green were so/so, but blue works best because there's only a bit of blue in the panel, and the blue of the base card brings it to the fore and helps balance the overall look of the card - sort of tops and tails it.

Here's a look at the finished card again:

Supplies Shirley used in today's project:




Prize alert! Leave a comment in this post for an entry to our Spotlight Projects random drawing for February. We'll pick a commenter to win a $10 gift certificate or her choice of 1 ARTplorations stencil. We'll announce the winner on March 1!