I've been looking at one of the most recent Grand Tour collages, Bird's Eye View, above, almost every day for the past few months. It hung directly across the studio from my work tables. So, each time I looked up, I glimpsed it.
After a while, I began to not like it. The dark background didn't allow viewers to see the birds clearly enough. The birds were too close to one another. In short, it needed more air.
Toss it? No. Time to rework it. I popped it out of the frame, which will be put to use another time, and onto the work table. Happily, in order to give it the collage a 3D quality, each piece was not glued down completely. And PVA, which is water soluble, was used as glue on some sections. Even so, it took a few days of tearing, cutting and careful removal, to separate the birds and their passengers from the background. There was only one casualty: the baby's head, which I saved to reattach.
As I soon discovered, all that was the easy part. Below are images of it in progress, including two showing what it might look like if I created two pieces from it. More photos will follow, because it took an odd turn after the bottom one. I set it aside for a few weeks, and, so, it remains a work in progress ...
