This piece was from a hike I did again in Okutama, from early 2020, in the middle of winter, pre covid. I remember at that point in time being quite stressful for me, and needed a bit of me time; and that the day before I did this hike, it snowed! Which for Tokyo, isn’t so common. And as an Aussie, I don’t get to see snow very often. So I was really looking forward to this hike!
In this particular photo, it was early in the morning with the sun peeking over the mountain top and you can see fresh snow from the night before on the tree tops and roofs.
For the most part, this was fairly simple to create. Mostly. Similar to the last collage in part III, I worked backwards. As in, I first started with painting the sky and then layered over the top with the rest of my collage. As you can see above, in the original, it was a clear, blue sky. But I didn't want to do ANOTHER blue sky, it was starting to get a bit repetitive. So I purposely added red and blue together when I painted the sky, in the hopes that I would get some cool blending effects from the two colours. (I forgot to take a progress shot of the sky, but you can see it below.)
Next, it was time figure out what colours to use and how I wanted them to interact with each other. I started out with the red and pink combination; I added green to make it stand out, butttttt I didn't like how it gave me Christmas vibes (red and green are Christmas colours). So, I swapped the green out for blue. Luckily, at this point I hadn't glued anything down. So was very easy to make that switch :)
For the sun, I used origami paper which I got from a local 100 yen shop. Origami paper is super thin so it's easier to fold and to craft paper sculptures. However, because of how thin it is, it makes it slightly translucent, which then makes the yellow a little dull and I really wanted a bright yellow! So what I did was to layer two pieces of yellow origami paper on top of each other, creating a more vibrant and less translucent yellow.
After everything has been put together (painted the sky and glued down the mountains) it was time for me to draw in some of the details and textures that the mountain had!
I also wanted to add in the intensity and the direction of the sunshine, using pastels.
The result was ok. In hindsight, what I should've done was played around with the colour of the sun more. I think an orange sun would've looked better because orange and blue are opposite colours and would make the image pop a little bit more.
The problem with using paper is that it's difficult to make a gradient look good (i.e.. changing a colour from light to dark). So I used pastels. And now I have a sun shooting lasers at mountains. Next time, I'll just use some paints.
I think this article is a little long than usual, so thanks if you got through it all!!
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