Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Personal project: Bombon[it]as


The orange butane gas canister is ubiquitous here in southern Spain, where there’s no mains gas supply, so unless you have an electric boiler or solar heated water, chances are at some point you’ve had to jump out of a cold shower to change the gas bottle (or even get dressed and go out to buy one).

In Spanish they are called ‘bombonas’, ‘bombonas bonitas’ means pretty gas canister so I’ve combined the two words for my title for this exercise.

For me it’s a design classic, I’ve explored it previously in my sketchbook
and decided to make this a more formal exercise.

Starting with a photo, I traced the outline and worked in many layers of charcoal to get the depth of black I wanted in the background and to shade the bombona.



My original intention had been to paint over the charcoal with an acrylic wash but having scanned the drawing into photoshop (and adjusted the brightness and contrast) I decided to play with some alternative colour combinations using layers.




I found these very pleasing and combined them into one image



Then I played with the tone and saturation to come up with the other colour combinations






I really like these; I think they have a pop-art quality to them, the effect of seeing a familiar object so differently is almost comical.

I did go on to apply an acrylic wash in classic orange 


and my next job is to apply a crackle glaze and some stains, and here is the finished piece



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