election​

Unlike many of my other pieces, I started this one with a distinct design in mind -- decidedly asymmetrical.  The first photo is my hand-drawn design.  I then made heavy use of the snap-to-grid feature in GIMP to render a digital version of the end product.  I thought it would be cool to form the image out of "bricks".  I also had been reading a lot about chromostereopsis, an optical illusion whereby the eye perceives contrasting colors at different depths, so I thought I'd try to incorporate that idea as well.  I wanted to the piece to appear to "jiggle" around.

The first photo here is of my cutting station.  To build this, I used red and blue tinted clear acetate, which I cut into small rectangles.  The pieces were "glued" onto the board using heavy-body white acrylic paint.  In retrospect, I wish I would have drawn a grid onto the board first; keeping the pieces straight with my naked eye was pretty difficult.

At this point, I had the design complete.  Now it was time to fill in the gaps with black.  To do this, I used heavy-body black acrylic paint to color in all the white space.  Once dry, I scraped off the excess with a painter's chisel.  It's amazing, and oddly satisfying, how adding the black completed the look of the piece.