Mission Simulator

A collection of acrylic paintings on transparent acrylic sheet (Perspex).

I'm attracted to colourful pictures, so I decided to make some. Taking some of my holiday snaps from America, I began colouring them in on the computer. I made sure that they could be printed out to scale, so I could copy them onto the acrylic sheet. Using the same colours and method as my inkjet printer, I worked line by line, layer by layer, until each picture was finished.

Before dipping my brush into anything, I had to turn the visual information into numbers. I had to know how many layers of each colour to put where. This put my chosen colours, tints, shades and tones on the correct picture planes. Like the inkjet printer, I didn't wonder about when the paintings were finished. They were done when I'd completed translating the written composition into paint.

I take terrible snaps on holiday, my eye's always drawn to the wrong things. However, there isn't much left of the original photos. I cropped a lot, and coloured over a lot. The paintings are nothing like the things I saw in America, any more than the photos were.

J.E.W.