Making the Kiss bedhead - stage 1 planning

Design-in-Action

Over the years I photographed how I went about creating my unique bedheads. I used to call this section of my web-site ‘Design in Action’ so clients could see how I managed the custom design process for any of the Fantasy Dreams artworks. This is the first of many such posts and the first of 4 on this particular bedhead:

A reproduction of the famous painting ‘The Kiss’ by Gustav Klimt which will be bejewelled, 3D and covered in gold leafed.

Planning the design

I do all my planning digitally, I have since 1990, I love using the computer simple as that. Many artists draw and sketch, I create a computer collage to start my process.

I find the image online and then chop it up to fit into the dimension I want as a finished product, in this case a queen size bedhead. I like to have an usual shape and try not to let structure get in the way of design. Below is a series of layouts I trialed to see which dimension worked best for me and the client.

1. Upright figures, close-up of their faces and using lighter or darker purple background.

2. Laying down perhaps?

3. Another upright spreading the golden fabric some more and raising the bodies higher against the backboard. This is powerful, it works for me. He is looming over her .. grarrrr.

4. Before cutting out any timber, I then create a life size sample of the bedhead to check dimensions, design and layout. The below picture is just that – a queen size bedhead painted and cut- out of brown paper . . It’s not a precise painting … just rough black felt pen and indicative colours only Note, as I found the background was getting too busy I add some plainer texture like in the first images to settle it down a bit.

Not too bad I thought – the family is impressed, they always struggle to imagine what is in my head until I get the life size done up. I eventually use a blown up photo to overlay this life-size original so I can tidy up some of the features.

This project was very easy to plan as the original image was already created by a world class artist, it is so much easier to replicate another artists hard work than design your own from scratch. However over the next three posts, I show you how I go about turning this design into a 3-dimensional work of art.

See: Making the Kiss bedhead – stage 2

See: Making the Kiss bedhead – stage 3

See: Making the Kiss bedhead – stage 4