Illustration 2 - Mount Trashmore

We got a project recently to do a collage in like manner of another illustrator (the list was provided).  I am not a huge fan of collage, but I figured that I’ll do something in the likeness of Robert Ryan (check his stuff out here).  My final version doesn’t resemble the stuff I was doing (which was closer to what he does with a single sheet) in the first couple of critiques on this project.  What I did though, in the end, was to combine the two separate ideas I had when the project first started and layered the image and cut out shapes with an exacto out of a few sheets of paper, then assembled them.

The short story is a person recalling how the landfill in their town was full of garbage and was a part of everyone’s life.  Hauling their trash to the landfill had also been damaging the environment though and it accounts how the state came in, stopped people from using it, covered it in grass and blocked it off with a fence.  Since then, the mount stands there holding their artifacts like a monument throughout time as they attempt to move on to recycling their goods.

This is what I did:

Personally I would rather have had designed this entirely on the computer for sake of precision and then printed directly to the paper I was going to cut out of.  Instead I did it by hand, which was rather time consuming. The image above isn’t exactly the final version, I added in stars in the blue sky after I scanned it. I just hope the next project is some other type of medium than collage, this isn’t fun for me.