Lewa the Last Windbreaker- Kanohi Miru collages

"Lewa The Last Windbreaker" has been a planned idea on the list for a very long time. The joke is rather an inside joke on my part, seeing I make references to Lewa being a windbag in the sense of bad gas through my fan fictions and occasional art pieces.

The blue arrow is obviously from "Avatar the Last Airbender" (which I've never watched, but know about some of the basic things). With that idea in mind, I found Lewa's kanohi miru to be perfect for slapping a blue arrow onto, along with my inside joke.

So much work went into tracing, cutting, and piecing my Mata masks together that I didn't want to ruin them with a side joke idea of adding a blue arrow to Lewa's forehead. This is why I went in digitally to create the joke versions.

Both the blue arrow and the lettering were added digitally, but the blue arrow was an actual paper cut out I made, and then scanned for this purpose. 

 

The idea to make collage versions of Lewa Mata's face was inspired by the colors of a magic eraser box. 

I went through two designs, leaving both the masks plain for the actual art pieces.

As shown above, there are two different kinds of backgrounds I made using watercolor and a new set of Tim Holtz stencils. There's the sunny version, and the splotchy version, both of them serving best for the slightly different gradients of the two masks. 

Collages measure around 9x12''.

 

As shown here, this is what the box looked like before I cut it into pieces and created two different Mirus from the front and back textures of the packaging.

Shown on the left is a back view of the mask, a display showing how I pieced it together and labeled the parts to keep track of everything.
 

Most of it was cut out using a razor blade, and glued together using fast tack tacky glue.
 

I had created myself a stencil of the Miru so all the shapes would be just right on the collage.
 

To make the pieces pop up off the page I used sticky foam pads, cut out multiple parts of ads for the eyes and face beneath, then did the rest using the magic eraser box.