Starfish

Over the years I visited a couple of aquariums, some on the east coast and some on the west coast. Visiting different places, such as aquariums, different beaches, can really inspire you to create new art pieces. The best, most inspirational areas I’ve been to were beaches in California. The rocky beaches were home to sea urchins, sea anemones, a variety of starfish, teeny tiny crabs, snails and seashells. It was amazing!

Like many artists, I have so many ideas of things that I want to create. Sometimes it takes literally years, to work it into the schedule. Although, other times, I think it takes a long time for that idea to really “work” (or maybe a better word may be “percolate”) its way to the top of the list. Even though I have an idea for a series in mind, and even though I am not actively working on the project, I do think your mind is working and thinking through the project in a much more passive way, and eventually, when the time is right, the project will come forward and reveal more of itself when it is ready.

Eventually, I came up with the idea of creating an entire series of Under the Sea Themed Paper Sculpture Aquariums. This series will all have a common, cohesive look to the paper sculptures due to the fact that the sculptures will all be made inside similar glass containers.

From time to time I have made quite a few ocean themed paper sculpted art pieces. Even though my original three-dimensional brightly colored coral reef paper sculpture has sold, you can still purchase that coral reef image on a spiral notebook.

I also made a very photo realistic paper sculpture, appropriately titled, “Paper Shells”. Even the sand is made out of hand cut painted paper.

Inspired from when I would go crabbing in Maryland, ere are just a few photos of some of the blue crab themed paper sculptures I made.

So far, I’ve been making a lot of the individual pieces that will go into this new Under the Sea Aquarium final pieces. So far, I made coral, seagrass, seashells, and sea turtles all out of paper and paint.

Now I needed to make some colorful starfish. Did you know there are over 2000 different starfish species around the world in a variety of different colors, styles and shapes. Most starfish have five arms, but some starfish, also known as sea stars and can have as many as 40 arms. That’s a lot of arms! As you can tell, I enjoy researching the items that I am going to make. Those  are just a few of the facts I learned.

Above, is a photo of a very interesting starfish I saw in a beach in California. At first I thought it was a little octopus. I didn’t know that starfish could have such long skinny arms. It was so interesting to watch it move all around and in between the rocks.

The starfish I made for the Under the Sea Aquariums are very colorful and vibrant. I wanted to stick to the color palette I had chosen for all of the aquariums. Pictured below is a sampling of my color palette - magenta, purples, gold, blues and greens. Vibrant and colorful.

To create the starfish, I started out with white paper. When I liked the size, shape and dimensionality of the starfish, next I added texture to them. I also wanted to emulate the rough texture a lot of starfish have.The final step was to paint them in the gorgeous purples, oranges and golds that you can see in the photos below. The finished three-dimensional starfish are colorful and have lots of texture as shown in the photos below.