It’s been awhile since I did a collage leaf ghost. They’re fun to put together, and they look good. But so much work! I was at this one for most of the day, taking break every once in awhile.
In addition to the usual prep sketch, I numbered the squares so I could figure out how many of each type I would need to find in the old atlas I used as my source. For the leaf I decided to use the same forest land colors I used last time.
But for the background I went in a new direction. Half of the squares are from a Manhattan street map, and the other half are from a state map of northeastern New York. Cutting all those 1.5-inch squares out of specific parts of specific maps took some doing.
To make them more visually distinct from each other, I dipped each piece in water and then used wet-on-wet watercolors to paint them blue before sticking them down with matte medium. The foreground didn’t need paint, so it went on more quickly.
The result unintentionally became a comment on climate change and rising sea levels, with the cities submerged under blue and the wild mountains becoming an island. Funny then that some of the leaf squares are from the San Gabriel Mountains part of a map of Los Angeles. And one of the darker national park squares includes “devastated area” and a location identified as “Bumpass Hell.”
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