The public gallery for the beginner stream has now been made public! You can see my response to the first creative brief ‘Soft Pop Bright Retro’ here!
I have thoroughly enjoyed the course so far and am looking forward to the next creative brief next week.
In the meantime I have been working on the first fun challenge – unusual mark-making using sand or mud. It’s winter here in New Zealand at the moment, so this exercise is not as appealing as it would be inthe height of summer! I was determined to give it a go, and decided to make my very own at-home beach in soft-pop-bright-retro colours.
First of all I coloured the sand using watercolour paints:
I had never done this before so was quite pleased that the sand sucked up the colours so nicely! (Phew!) I dried the sand over the heater, and pressed and shaped the sand into little hillocks. Hey presto, I had my very own pastel coloured miniature sand dunes just like in The Neverending Story!
Wait, did The Neverending Story have rainbow sand dunes? Well yes – in the book by Michael Ende on which the film is based, Bastian visits Goab The Desert of Colors, the remains of a beautiful multicoloured glowing night-forest.
“Each hill revealed a shade or tint that recurred in no other. The nearest was cobolt blue, another was saffron yellow, then came crimson red, then indigo, apple green, sky blue, orange, peach, mauve, turquoise blue, lilac, moss green, ruby red, burnt umber, Indian yellow, vermillion, lapis lazuli. And so on from horizon to horizon. And between the hills separating color from color, flowed streams of fold and silver sand.”
I was of course limited to the few colours and had in my watercolour set, but at some point I would like to recreate this project on a much larger scale with many more colours!
I took super-closeup photos using my macro extender tube to make it seem like I was standing right there in the miniature rainbow dunes.
I was also inspired by the moving abstract sand dunes that appear briefly towards the end of of the Toccata and Fugue segment in Disney’s Fantasia:
While my original idea of drawing patterns into the sand didn’t work out as I had hoped, I love the end result!