Greetings once again! I have been hiding away working on several artworks lately, as well as having no internet. I feel as though I've had an arm chopped off. I've had to plan everything I do since all my tools and equipment are at my studio (1/2 hour bus ride away) but internet access is at home or in wireless hotspots (while my laptop battery lasts). It's all been quite topsy-turvy.
This weekend was the long awaited
LeeLoo Once Upon exhibition at aMBUSH Gallery in Sydney. The exhibition brought together 38 Australian artists to create four pieces in the theme of fairytales. Each artist was assigned their own fairytale, mine being Jack & the Beanstalk.
I was one of the few artists who didn't do hand-drawn or painted artworks. I do hand-drawn elements as well as embroidery, but I predominantly pull everything together in Photoshop. In order to illustrate exactly what it is I do I thought I'd write this post and show you the original sources of some of my material:
Above is some of the original sources I used for the first piece
Jack #1. I usually scour public domain searches looking for good quality scans of artwork, the body of Jack comes from Jenny Norstrom's
Boy with the Cherries, via Wikimedia Commons. I then hand-drew the face from the Victorian Boy illustration, cutting and pasting his hair over the top (see the sketches below).
The cow comes from a Victorian clip art collection, and the striped paper from iStockphoto. The plants in the background were found in Wikimedia Commons, sifting through the botanical illustrations collected there. The star came from an image sharing website, and created the hanging stars in the background of all the artworks.
Everything is cut and pasted, adjusted, some small effects added and other Photoshop magic to pull it all together. The little icons I included in each piece show a little flower gradually growing, representing the progression of the story and the images.
The files were then sent to Genius Print in Melbourne and made into Giclee prints on Canson PhotoSatin Premium Archival Lustre Paper (270gsm). There are only 5 prints of each artwork, and each is signed and numbered on the reverse. The artworks sent to the exhibition are all numbered "1" and framed in the beautiful white baroque style frames selected by Leeloo.
If you are interested in buying any of these artworks, contact Renee at
renee@leeloo.com.au. All artworks are A5 in size, excluding the frame. Each is priced at AUD$130 (approx USD$118) and are the only prints in the limited edition run to be framed.
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