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The Painted Hills 1 - a collage painting and tutorial

Painted Hills 1
by Cyndi Lavin, 2016
Prints for sale

Mike and I like to travel out to Oregon to see our daughter each year, and we usually go sometime in September, when the temperature tends to be just perfect and the rainy season hasn't started yet.  Each time we go, we leave her home in Portland and head off in a different direction to see what we can find.  This year, we headed inland to the desert, and in particular, to the Painted Hills.  


The shot above is just one of 10 million (it seemed like, anyway) that I took of the beautiful high desert and the Painted Hills themselves.  So far, I have created two collages inspired by the Hills, and I kind of expect there may be more to come in the future.  Or maybe a quilt...

Anyway, I thought I'd share a bit about the technique that I use to get the textures in this piece.  When I'm on site, one of the things I shoot a lot of are close ups of great texture.  Besides images of landscapes with interesting composition, like the one above, I shoot a lot like this:


Using whatever method of creating a simplified line drawing that you like (here are a few ideas using Photoshop), reduce it to something like this:


From here you can print them out onto heavy paper and do an image transfer, you can use it as a reference and physically draw (pen and ink) onto your collage pieces, or you can print it out onto tissue paper and add it directly to your collage.  I'm sure there are other ways, too, but these are my preferred methods.

Copyright 2016 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact.

Comments

Robbie said…
This is a really, really nice piece!!!!! I like the idea of printing onto tissue paper! Look forward to more tutorials from you! Thanks again!
Cyndi L said…
The idea kind of came from my quilts, where I print out like this on cotton panels :-)