Starting out I knew I wanted to continue with death culture in America, but post discussions with Prof Silva I've narrowed down my idea a little to consider how capitalism has shaped the death industry. I'm afraid religion will also be a factor in how the death industry has risen to the monster it is today. But in terms of my characters and projects I'm mostly thinking about capitalism.
For my first character, the antagonist, I knew I wanted to do a fat business man. How I would do this I did not know. My initial step was to take a piece of cardboard and draw him out. Once I got to cutting I had an idea to do layering to make him more 3D and awesome looking. But I quickly ran into the one issue I could not predict. Immense fatigue from allergy issues and a shot I got on Monday. I hate using medical issues as an excuse, and I hate how he turned out, I honestly and considering continuing work on him (if I ever get the time or energy).
So what I did was I cut him out, cut a line between his legs and made a small standing piece so he could stand tall! And weird!
I wound up giving him a sad face on the front, to indicate the sad facade he gives to customers as if he's trying to hard to sympathize with these poor folks who lost a loved one.
On the back is his "true face" or the inner intentions. All he thinks about is money and getting as much out of the clients as possible. So the typical business man, but he needs to be able to shed a tear on command for poor grandma.
As for my protagonist, Prof Silva gave me a great idea. Instead of doing a person, I could do a place! Because what really suffers from our death industry is our wallets and our planet. The shift to large concrete buidlings to house urns and large concrete blocks to house coffins so our dead don't contaminate the well water of our small communities, and the plastics and metals in coffins used and left in the ground is not very nice to mother nature.
So for this I wanted to make a small wooded area with a decomposed body and some flora growing from it.
I took apart a toilet paper roll and cut it into thin pieces and rolled them on a pen, took another apart to create the tree stump, and used an in tact paper towel roll for the large tree. This tree was given the curls to create a weird leaf pattern. I took a few triangles of cardboard and took a layer off to expose the texture and left the fringed top layer for bush like quality.
I cut out a small skeleton and took off the top layer to have a similar texture.
I took the curls from removing layers to create general foliage around the trees.
For the mushroom growing on our lovely protagonist I wanted it to be colorful so I felted it!
I know that's probably cheating, but I wanted it to be colorful and different so it would stand out. I used white, orange, and red felt to make my little fun guy and placed him near the body.
Here's the final two pieces:
Hope you enjoyed, thanks for reading!
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