If any paper ever perfectly captured the riotious color of a properly schmaltzy German Christmas tree—the kind my mom remembers from her childhood and put up during mine—this is it—colored lights, ornaments in every color, so long as they were bright. So, naturally, when I grew up, I determined to have one that matched, the result being that it has no color at all, since I only put silver, white and cream ornaments on it. This has proven to be a mistake, but, oh well.
Three gifts; the largest is about 11x14”. December 2005.
Hm. I notice this stuff, like the other brightly colored paper I used, also has lime green in it...
This gift graphically illustrates the error of shooting down but to one side of a gift, thinking one can rotate it 90 degrees in gimp later. —I stood to the side of the gifts rather than the perceived top or bottom to keep from blocking the light; as a result a great many of my gift pix have rather skewed senses of ‘down’ to them. But, given the rate I took these pictures, it's lucky I have any at all...
This gift illustrates a technique for using crumpled ribbon: note the mylar (metallic) green ribbon decorating this box. Sections were crumpled—so I just balled the whole thing in my hand to give a consistant, crinkly texture to the ribbon. In fact, even if the ribbon were perfectly new, this would be a good way to take down some of the overwhelming shinyness.
Note the contrast between the two yellow curling ribbons, both in hue and ‘curliness’ —the less curled one is very old and was originally wound on a fairly small cylinder, and used as is.
file created 26dec05 sylvus tarn
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
