mel brewster art

Mycological Warfare

This ended up being a super fun project for me! I was feeling kind of stuck in the beginning, so I started to cut things out and created a number of different characters that I began to build stories around — which was super fun and is a tool that I think I will use in the future to get the creative juices flowing when I am feeling stuck! I didn’t end up using all of the characters, so maybe I’ll do something in the future with them. 🙂

I used pieces from a ton of different coloring books and coloring pages, but I ended up enjoying the challenge of using some of the same pieces in a variety of different ways to create different elements. The rabbit ears are an example of that – all of the big flowers were made by putting about sixteen rabbit ears together and using them as petals to create the shape of a flower, then another ear or two for the leaves on the stems. The centers are made with the circles from the berries in another coloring book.

The character with the Princess Leia face is made from the legs of She-Ra from a vintage She-Ra and He-Man coloring book, two mushroom caps from another coloring book that make up her outfit (including what looked a lot to me like an Elizabethan collar which I loved), the mushrooms over her head and over her shoulder as well as the bouquet she’s holding are from a botany coloring book, the swirl over her right shoulder was a piece from the same coloring book as the larger mushroom caps, and the airship that she’s holding in her hand was from yet another coloring book.

The airships lost part of the original pieces and gained the wings from fruit bats (from a free online coloring page) and their cargo that is hanging down may look like flowers is actually an example of an algae called Acetabularia that lives at the bottom of lakes (from the Botany coloring book).

The hills are all made from the forms of the tops of the mushroom caps and from the shape of the undersides of some snails with houses on their backs.