Shadow Boxes in Process

I’ve been working on a series of three shadow boxes that I’ll show the completed versions of you shortly.  I thought you may enjoy seeing a bit of the process of the work.

For one of the boxes i wanted to have a starry sky in the back. Since the box was about boyhood/masculine identity I chose to drill holes in the wood and use marbles as the "stars" per-say. That way if there is light behind the work the marbles will glow. At the top of the picture is the silhouette cut out of the landscape and houses that is part of the same piece as well. The dalle de verre scraps of glass I ended up using in the same piece.

For one of the boxes I needed an image of Phoenix Arizona at night, so I did a little oil painting for it.

For the box that has the sky of marbles I in addition needed a moon. Staying on the "boyhood" theme of the piece I used a baseball of my grandfathers and used William Wirt (an Attorney General from the 1800's that I'm a fan of) as my inspiration for the face.

I had this wonderful idea to create a tree for one of the shadow boxes that ended up being an abysmal failure. When completed I thought it came across as "scary," not the feeling I wanted to get across in the piece. We'll see if it shows up somewhere else.