coulrophobia clown collages

I've been scrambling the past two days working on these. I'm in a trade with the paper art group I belong to. We're doing pages for a journal and the theme is circus.

My late start this time had nothing to do with procrastination. I just had a heck of a time deciding what I wanted to do. I went through several different designs but all of them felt far too cutesy and, well, incredibly colorful. Which sounds awful but what can I say?

I was browsing my brother's photos and found this creepy clown photo and knew I had found my focal image (posted and used with his permission):


The creepiness factor is exactly what I was looking for but I decided that I needed to get rid of some of the green. I tortured it a bit in photoshop and Picnik and ended up with this version:


With this tone, I can doodle on it to my heart's content which is what I really need for collage elements.

(If you've never used Picnik, I highly recommend it. Its a good photo editing software and comes in really handy - especially if you don't have photoshop or anything like that. There is a free version and a pro version upgrade (which is about $25) and I use it constantly. Its pretty posh.)

The most daunting thing about the swap is that I need ten copies of the collage. There was some talk about doing color photocopies at the last meeting and I gave that some serious thought. In the end, I decided it just wasn't me so I made ten similar pages by hand.

I have a cramp in my hand but hey, its done. Here's a view of a single page:


On the lower right hand corner of the creepy clown's costume I wrote: "coulrophobia - fear the clown." If you haven't guessed yet, coulrophobia is the phobia of clowns which I personally feel is a healthy phobia that shouldn't be cured. They are creepy as all get out.

I just need to put a label on the back and its all set. I love doing these trades, everyone has such a different view of the same theme. I'll post the pages from the other artists after I get them on wednesday.