Thursday, April 19, 2012

Finished Guitar for Musical Youth Foundation

About two weeks ago I began work on this project.  I am taking part in an exhibition organised by the Musical Youth Foundation, as part of the 6th annual Dublin Soul Music Festival next month (May 24th-27th).  The Musical Youth Foundation is charity which aims to provide every child in Ireland with access to a musical education. 
The brief was to use a guitar as your canvas.  

 The surface of the guitar was sanded down.  I painted it white.   Then I began to draw the figures of the children and decide what each one was doing - playing ball, singing, etc...   When all the figures were completed and the place was decided for each I fixed them to the guitar and finally varnished the whole thing. 

 Then I got to work cutting up pages and pages of sheet music.  I really really enjoyed that part!
 The children I've drawn represent my daughter and her friends... They know who they are....  Each activity represents that particular child's interests/personality.

 I used a different set of sheet music for the neck of the guitar as I knew I wanted a line-up of items on this part and I wanted the contrast of the older sheet music against the newer and brighter page of the background.  The song on the newer sheet music is a song about youth.   
 The brief was to paint the front of the body and neck, but I was enjoying this so much I decided to carry on and decorate the back as well.  This part I covered in sheet music.  
 Here's a detail from the front of the guitar; musical flowers, butterflies, even a happy musical snail!
You can see that I have glued my card to the inside of body - just noticeable through the sound hole.  I wanted to put my stamp on it somewhere but it didn't seem right to scrawl a signature on the guitar after all my hard work.  I noticed that the maker's name, brand, etc., is stamped inside the guitar so that's where my card went.

And now here's another celebration of musical youth; Bobby Benson and his Baby Band!

And another one!

1 comment:

Ina said...

oh wow! this came out great! well done!