Artist at Work

Who made the beautiful art on the cover of this month's CLICK? Jo Lynn Alcorn, an illustrator who lives in Connecticut. Jo Lynn uses many tools to create her art-paints, brushes, wood, and most important of all, PAPER! Jo Lynn is a cut-paper artist.

Jo Lynn first makes a pencil sketch on see-through tracing paper.

Next she looks through all the different kinds of paper she's collected. She needs to find a piece for the girl's head, her hair, her shirt, and all the other parts of the drawing.

If Jo Lynn doesn't have the perfect paper, she will paint plain paper to get just the look she wants. Here she's combing wet paint so the paper will look like wood.

Next she turns her pencil sketch over and traces each part of the drawing onto the back of the paper she has chosen. She has to push hard with a ball point pen to transfer the pencil line onto the paper.

Now she cuts out each of the shapes along the pencil line.

Jo Lynn builds her art using balsa wood, foam core, and different kinds of tape. Here she's adding layers of these materials to the back of the girl's arm and paint palette. When she puts the piece down on her picture it will be higher than the layer below.

She starts with the background and works toward the front layer of the picture. Sometimes she curls or folds parts of the papers, as she has done here to make the edge of the easel and the girl's wavy hair.

It's like putting together a puzzle with many layers.

The finished art is too delicate to put in the mail. So a photographer takes a picture of it to send to CLICK.

The photographer uses lights to make interesting shadows where the different layers meet.

From sketch to final art, it took a lot of time, paper, paint, and most of all-a talented artist.

Copyright Carus Publishing Company Oct 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved