May Flower Challenge • Red Sunflower

Red Sunflower for May Flower Challenge • Day Four

Red Sunflower                                                                      by Deborah Velasquez©2012

Red Sunflower for day four of The May Flower Challenge . Each day you can post your flower creation, whether it is a doodle, drawing, photograph, collage or painting. This challenge has been started by  Lori Moon, fellow blogger, talented photographer and jewelry artisan. Sign up and join in on the flower fun. Can't wait to see what you create as well! Please note: You do NOT have to participate every day. Play along on a specific day each week or only once - whatever inspires you. Join the challenge, here, it is going to be fun. 

Make sure to visit the other artists who are participating in the challenge at Lori Moon's website. I love challenges like this because it helps build reference material for your body of work, it adds to your sketchbook, portfolio, motif library if you are a Surface pattern designers and so on. Make it work for you.

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My Red Sunflower is part of another old project I have resurrected in order to finish. It so happened to have my red sunflower sketch in it, so how appropriate for the May Flower Challenge!

 I love flea market and antiquing finds. I came across a few small school chairs for children and knew immediately that I needed to re-purpose them some how. I wanted to make this for my youngest son. I pulled the chair apart to start my re-purposing, painting and decoupage project.

Here is the skeleton of the chair with back and seat removed.

I played around with some original drawings and art papers I had in the studio. I made a copy of my sunflower sketch used in The Sketchbook Project 2011. The Sketchbook Project is a traveling library of artists' books created by thousands of people from across the globe. After the sketchbook travels on exhibition it sits in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Library in New York. Here is a video which explains the project.

Playing with artwork and art papers.

I took the chair apart to work on the back and seat separately.

Back

Seat

I copied the original in all sizes large and small. I cut the pieces I would use to adhere to the chair. The larger background pieces were cut very close to the edges of the back and seat. I traced the shapes to define my edges. The wood was then sanded down on both pieces and I painted them black. I wanted the sides and bottom to show as black as the background in the art paper had a black in background. Then I Mod Podged the pieces to the wooden back and seat to give you have what I have shown you above. 

This brings us to what is left to do!! I have to finish by painting another coat of Mod Podge on the back and seat and I need to paint the skeleton metal base of the chair black. To be honest I have no idea where the screws are to put it back together again! Wish me luck! I will post a photo of my finished chair. The weather is getting better, the rain has stopped, now it is time to get outside and get painting!

Thank you for stopping by!

All images and content belong to Deborah Velásquez. Copyright 2005-2012.  All rights reserved.

Please do not use anything without permission or without making note of the origin on your blog or website