Paper cut outs using simple shapes....

Heren are some pretty appaling photographs of the paper cut outs which we did in todays (Thurs Jan 21st) lesson. I chose to make a cut out of my Quetzalcoatl (a feathered serpent), which i tried to do usinf simple shapes.


Intial Beginnings......

I liked the image of Ben Newman's work which Ben had shown us earlier on, so i decided to try and replicate what he had done, hence the weird almost cat like arms and claws. I restricted myself to only using green and blue sugar paper, and tracing paper, as i felt that the final image would look better with a reduced colour palette as oppose to lots of bright colours, which may then detract from the shapes.

Here's the first version. I tried to stick with the idea of just using smple shapes, hence the triangluar wings and ears. I intially made the arms too long, (as you can see here) so they kind of got in the way of the creature's face when you were looking at it.....

Here's the finished creature (without a background)

I made the arms slightly shorter and added a triangular pattern to the ears, legs, arms and tail (not shown here). I quite like the idea of simplifying the creatures into simple shapes, but I'm not really sure that it's a technique i want to use when i illustrate the Quetzalcoatl and Jormungandr...

To try and tie in with the Quetzalcoatl's origins and history i added a background that features a kind of Mayan(?) temple (a series of steps up one side of the image) and then used pastels to shade in a sky. I'm not really sure if the pastels work, but it was kind of interesting to experiment with using 2 totally different mediums within the same illustration.

Here's a slightly blurred photograph of the final thing.