Friday, December 9, 2011

Asian Lady: Phase II

Okay, in case you forgot.. i did a oversized (for me) painting of an Asian woman last year...


I wanted to work her into the Dana comic, so I printed out some art I painted of antique Trout Ads from the early 1900s.. these I carefully reproduced, and they will show up in the Dana stories too.


The idea is to make a collage out of them behind the Asian lady.


But just like the painting itself, i didn't want it to look too perfect. That's why i deliberately flung pant splatters on the woman's kimono.


Tedious to cut them all out. I don't think anyone's seen these ads yet, i've spent years piling them up. I'll hand paint over them once their pasted onto the canvas too.


Like wise, i wanted some of the ads to be readable... and some just bunched together in a really messy way, like dried garbage..


So i had to tear and wrinkle some up a little. This part was really pretty cathartic. Usually your pussyfooting around art to pretty it up.


Acid free glue will get the ads to stick, but first i'll add some sepia brown with stamp pads to the background, before pasting the ads in.


Careful around the face...


I spread them all out on the hood of a friends red car hood- because i was short of work space. Tried not to get glue on his hood!


burnishing down all the little ads.




In a way, it seems like a cheat i didn't hand draws these onto the canvas.  Yeah, i could have.  I mean, i drew the originals, so why didn't i do it on the painting too?


Because i just wanted to blend what is obviously a real printed ad image in with my hand painted work. It's *supposed* to look 'pasted in'...


The grungy old vintage ads... juxtaposed with the idolized image of the Asian woman herself.


Yeah, it looks pretty icky while it's wet, but hopefully it'll dry looking better.


So there we are. Just gotta let it all dry now. Not sure if i'll paste in more ads in the blank spots, or just leave them as is... don't have to decide right now.  I bet someone might glance at the before image above, then how it is now and totally freak out - "oh NO, you ruined it!" lol

Yeah, in a way i did.  Or maybe not.  It depends on what you value.

Weird how it starts by hand (my drawing them), then they're scanned, printed out, defaced 9meaning i crunch them up ) then are pasted down, then ENDS by hand too with me painting over that.  It's like the computer and printer are just two more tools.

Now the only bit that bugs me is I''d like to mover her nose over a little.. maybe add some more cross hatching line work to her face?... hopefully i won't OVER- work her face.

Plus i'll need to go in by hand and repaint over most of the ads.. i doubt anyone other than us will notice (or care) how much time i've foolishly lost on this sucker, but so what.

doing this goofy assed crap, makes me happy.

...re-paitng is a job for another day.

That'll be asian lady 'phase III'.