after the colorstudies were finished i  needed to start to figure how all of this was going to get built and how i was going to build things that worked well for each image but didnt end up being more work than they needed to be.

it was overwhelming to try to see it all at once, so i took advantage of all the prep work i had done and found that it allowed me to have most everything scratched out on paper so my mind could start to focus on individual aspects without getting bogged down everything all at once. i started with the ocean i knew it was going to be the foundation of the scenery, it needed to work for several different scenes. to me that meant that it needed to be easy to work with. in the past i have used actual water for scenes with water. but i learned that even though water has a look all its own it sometimes looks too real for the worlds i create, besides it can get really hard to control too. once i almost flooded the studio when a garden hose spraying water on set got out of hand… i have also used saran wrap in the past and although it had some properties i enjoyed, it still looked like saran wrap. i have seen folks use mirrors or glass with elements added on the surface to mimic ocean foam and ripples but that didnt seem like the right application either.

so in keeping with the theme of garbage  i pulled out some discarded, large, clear plastic bags that my large art boards get put into at the art store. they had a substance to them that saran wrap didnt have and the light played on the surface and gave a feeling of a heavy ocean. now i was getting somewhere. the next material i found was the plastic bags that the local dry cleaners use. they were a little lighter than the art bags and they had a blue tint.

now i felt like i was onto something. here are the first ocean tests that set up the foundation of the Garbage Barge’s world.

the following image was shot with a paper cutouts of the colorstudies of the tug and barge.