Regatta

This piece is made of paper collage adhered to the panel using matte medium. Note that there are 2 areas in this piece where the paper is distressed a little: in the boat there was a little ripping in the hull area and some wrinkling in the smaller sail, and there is a lightly wrinkled area in the largest beige sail. The piece is lovely, but if you have OCD tendencies, you may want to skip this one. The price has been discounted and will be loved by the right person. :) The piece is finished with a coat of clear leveling gel and a cold wax rub, both of which help protect the painting over time. The painting has a semi-gloss finish. This piece is framed in a white 12"x12" Cardinali Renewal Core Floater Frame that is 3/4" deep. The frame is screwed into small wooden dowels that have been glued to the back of the wood panel. If you want to replace this frame down the road, you can do so by removing the screws from the back and carefully removing the wood panel from the frame. The back of the frame includes a sawtooth hanger and bumpers at the bottom for hanging the piece. A certificate of authenticity is adhered to the back of the piece using archival-quality adhesive.

My goal with this piece was the effective use of complementary colors and color value. This piece is 100% collage using colored construction paper, no acrylic or other media. I knew I wanted to do something sailing themed, so I laid down some pieces as a colorful background, then focused on cutting pieces of paper to look like different sail shapes. I used rectilinear shapes for the background and triangles for the sail shapes. I added a single circle at top-left that might be a sun. (The yellow rectangle in the center is a sun metaphor too.) I had fun going abstract with this one, putting sails of different shapes and sizes here and there, using some of the rectilinear shapes in the background as anchors. I originally had it rotated 90 degrees, with a yellow sky and blue ocean, but it looked more dynamic rotated 90 like this. I also went more colorful than I usually do. I purposely used all cut shapes in this piece. Over time I want to use both torn and cut shapes. Torn shapes have a softer edge to them, so I’m thinking those would look more natural to use as distant elements (which have softer edges), where I would use cut shapes for closer elements, to simulate them being fully in focus. I wanted to stay super simple and clean with the design here -- all simple colors and shapes -- so I used cut edges. I thought about using acrylic ink to add some more subtle elements, but I stopped short of doing that. This a bold, simple, color-blocked composition, and I thought that adding softer colors might water down the overall effect. I learned more about working with collage on this piece. I accidentally ripped the main sail shape in the center after it had been glued down and already had the black sail glued down on top of it. To work around this snafu, I cut another sail shape, then layered that over the other 2. There’s a little bit of bumpiness from the mess below, but it’s mostly smoothed out now. I’ve learned to wipe off excess glue using a baby wipe where possible. In other practice pieces I noticed that when I left pools of glue, they dried thick and milky, not a good look.