Customised Christmas Cards

Our project brief was to make a painting that others around cannot see easily. I struggled with this a lot. One idea was to paint a piece of white paper white and to put that on top of the ream of paper my mum and dad had for their printer.  But this was hidden away in a cupboard, and as soon as they touched the sheet of painted paper they would notice.

I was then looking at the Christmas cards that we had received and one card in particular was very flat.  It was angels adding decoration onto a Christmas tree, but the card was not very good quality and the gold tinsel was so faint.  So I decided to add gold paint to the glow of the candles and the tinsel just to brighten the card up.  Also as I hadn’t had a chance to use my gold paint yet and this was a great opportunity.  It worked really well, and unless you knew otherwise you would have thought this was the original card.

I then thought of decorating a few other cards.  A card with three Christmas trees, I repainted, wasn’t very pleased with the outcome, as I made the middle tree too big.  A gold Christmas tree, I surrounded with white dots of paint, to look like snow.  A robin on a twig, I added big blobs of paint around it as part of the background. Finally a photograph of a squirrel I made into ‘action’ squirrel, by surrounding it with graduating colours of white into pink then purple.

I put all my decorated cards back on the shelf amongst the other Christmas cards, and would see if anyone noticed.

No one did.  The only time my mum noticed is when she took all the Christmas decorations down in January.

Project accomplished!

Spot the difference

Painted gold tinsel and glow

Painted tree 2 & 3

Customised Christmas Cards

I really enjoyed this project in the end, as it was fun to add to an image that wasn't mine and to make it into something else.