Scraps Vol. I

*I started writing this post a few years ago, but never finished.  Recent work during this past week and a half has made portions of this post more relevant, so I've added the new stuff onto this (3-year) older post.

Negative shapes.  It always amuses me how frequently my scraps/negative shapes might be more visually compelling than my positive shapes (i.e. the original bits I intended to keep/use)

Here is Punchy during the initial stages of fabrication for a shaped canvas (he will also be making a 2-dimensional appearance in another piece I am working on currently titled Imminent Departure...)

Now here are a few of the negative shapes.  They remind me of melted versions of the giant heads on Easter Island.

Paired together in close proximity the start to interact.

Interesting shape.  Maybe someday I will turn it into a shaped canvas?

The cowboy/conquistador head from Quest(Shun) made a nice negative shape.

Pairing a few things together just to see how they work as a whole.  Verdict: not so great.  Back to the drawing board...

A random something I wrapped in fabric.  Looking at this image, I have not seen this shape running around my studio in a while, I wonder if I used it, or lost it...

I needed some ovals for the cameo portion of Lord Fenton Percival Philpotts Pennymoore in my piece, Naughty...

The circles/ovals came from the center of the negative shape (scrap piece of cardboard) in the second image.

However, once I cut out the ovals, this scrap piece of cardboard (negative shape) all of a sudden became an interesting positive shape in its own right.

I have come up with two potential ideas/sketches thus far from this one shape.  The first is sort of a quasi-skyline with a face (moon/sun?) in the center.

And the second idea is a large/obnoxious Rambo-esque gun, but where the face was in the image above, I'm kinda liking the idea of turning that oval into a small fish bowl.

I've have recently been on an abandoned road-side sign/billboard silhouette kick.  Here are just three of the signs.  I will cover these in more detail in an upcoming post.

Here are some of their negative shapes.  They will probably be cleaned up a bit and incorporated into some future project as well.

In a recent post, I talked about this formation of shapes.  I neglected to show what grew out of just one of its negative shapes.

Notice the long shape right of center (the one with crenelation on top)?  After I cut that shape out, I was left with a scrap (negative shape) that ultimately became this shape below.  It took over a day to make the little rectangles that fit inside the three windows.  The negative shape circles aren't going to waste either.

Since Punchy started this whole thing, we'll close with a few images of the first layer of imagery.

Next time we'll take a look at some more of those road sign/billboard objects on which I have been working.