Marf Productions - Monthly Challenge October

This month is for collage/assemblage! Get experimental and try to include different papers, feathers, flowers or whatever small or big?) objects you find suitable for your illustration.
It may get messy ...


Some inspiration:

Ute Rathmann

TechnoDragon

Regen

Sweet Dreams

Vivarium

Adolie Day


So there are heaps of possibilities …

But first of all there's some collecting to do. See, what you could work with, what you'd like to add to your picture.
Here's some of the stuff I already have at hand. There's also some technical junk somewhere, old wallpaper, newspaper, stamps … so on.
But it's not enough :D Half of the fun comes with collecting and finding cool things, so after I've finished today's inktober drawing I'll go outside, visit a nearby park and see what nature has in store for me. It's Autumn, so there should be plenty.

Since this months illustrations are mostly influenced by the material at hand, I tried to work rather intuitive, decided which objects I wanted to use and what kind of image would work for it.

Not much planning involved. 

Here some short visual notes of the three (Not nessecarily for this challenge. I might finish two of them.)  illustrations I'd like to create.

(scribbles here)

Since I'm already looking for a way to translate my doll-work to a more two-dimensional way of working, this seemed to be a perfect chance to experiment a bit. 

As you can see I put some modelling clay on the paper to have some 3dimensional shapes. Also some elements reach ot of the image, giving the whole thing more depth. 

The dress consists of tissue paper soaked with thinned wood glue to give it form.

Newspaper and book papes to give the background more structure.

If this was one of my dolls I'd give the whole object a dark brown undercoat (I prefer priming everything dark instead of white because it turned out to work better with my usual colour schemes. If you want super bright colours it would probably not be the best choice.), but in this case I still want the writing to shine through and decide that the dress doesn't need one either.

I nevertheless prime the skin areas to come as close as possible to the way I colour my dolls.

Adding in colour, trying to work out the textures of the dress.

Very simple: Washes of a darker colour (I tend to use sepia ink because I'm lazy) that will fill in all the grooves and scratches, letting everything dry and use a lighter colour applied with a very dry brush (This will be the end of the brush. Never ever use an expensive one.) on all the higher areas (Dry brushing. I feel like it's actually pretty basic stuff so I don't feel like elaborating on this. I will though, if there's interest).

And the finished version … as you can see I changed her face quite a bit (repainted about 4 times. It's a bit difficult to keep it rough and simple and not starting to fully render everything)  to achieve the more crooked look of my dolls. 

The yarn is painted red with acrylics to stabilize it (alternatively to wood glue) (and give it the right colour obviously) and then sewn into the 'fabric'.

At the end I framed her and gave the frame a sepia ink wash for more texture. (Also a bit dilluted sepia ink on the background. For texture. Just be careful, it lightens when drying but you don't want to ruin things …)

That's it for now, maybe I'll manage a second one, but that depends on time and motivation :)