project 52:22

foil, ink and acrylic on paper

Well, despite the fact that we swore we wouldn't do anything for Valentine's, Cass turned up with some surprises for me after a very late meeting at work (I think he got home around 8:30pm?), and I bought him a really cute card and a little bag of chocolates in pretty wrappers with pansies on them. He's always liked pansies - and chocolate!

As we were nibbling those chocolates over the weekend, Cass worked the foil wrappers until they were completely smooth and then started folding cranes out of them. He's amazing; so careful, so meticulous. And the results were beautiful - the colorful centers of the flowers appeared only on their rounded backs.

I took a photo of a handful of his cranes the handful of remaining chocolates to use as a model for last week's postcard. You can't really make it out in the photo (here is one time in which real life cannot really be captured and reproduced!), but I made the cranes by applying cut pieces of the foil, recreating the actual shininess of the cranes. I had to cut apart some of his cranes to have enough foil, using an exacto blade to carefully remove wing joints and cut off limbs before unfolding and then recutting the foil in order to collage it onto the paper base. I used washes of acrylic paint to shadow and highlight, giving dimensionality to the otherwise flat-and-shiny collage.

I rendered the still-wrapped chocolates in ink and acrylic; I wanted them to be a little flatter and simpler so that the cranes would really pop. The result was rather eye-searingly bright, shiny, very pop. I like it; it's so cheerful.

No prints of this one, though - because guess what you can't put in a scanner? That's right: foil. I did try; the results were hilariously blown-out.