ok, here's a project i've been working on for a while.

when on holiday, i took 4 small square canvas panels, laid them out in a rectangle and painted a kind of colorful curvy panorama, using a harmonious colorpalette borrowed from Cozen & Pritchard.

though the canvas was tough to work on, even with fluid acrylics, i really liked the sense of flow i got when looking at the result

after taking shots of the individual panels and using them as background for my photo collages, i started playing around with the squares, creating different quadrants. at one point a shape manifested itself so i outlined the contours in white.

i started filling up the shape with shreds of tissue paper that i first drenched in a glaze of iridescent bright gold, then crumpled and stuck to the panels with gel medium and finally covered with some extra glazes of bright gold.
i let it dry, then decided to cut through the shape that now held the four panels together, thus dividing the quadrant in individual shapes again, which i shuffled around until i discovered a new shape that i could work with.

i had to let it rest fore a while, got caught up in other stuff, but the idea of a map, the outline of some fantasy continent had already surfaced and settled in my creative synapses....

so i created a high contrast B&W copy of the quadrant, made another version with MobileMonet, where i desaturated all the color except for the gold, leaving a grey border all around to strengthen the effect of cartographic relief depiction, then blended these two with a shot of the remains of a fire i found in the marshes two days ago. finally i added a Miracam filter to give it a more vintage look.

uncharted territory