Tien Chiu

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You are here: Home / All blog posts / Heaven and Hell
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October 31, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Heaven and Hell

On this night, Samhain, when the veil is thin between the worlds, and magick is in the air…

…I’d like to present my work-in-progress for my design class, “Heaven and Hell”.

You may recall that this assignment is all about textures, visual and tactile, and that there were to be a series of three pieces, which could be related (or not).  I decided to do “Heaven, Hell, and Earth” with a theme of “Dreaming of Freedom”.

Here is my rough draft for “Hell”:

Design 5A project #4, "Hell", rough draft
Design 5A project #4, "Hell", rough draft

This is really more of a layout than a finished piece.  Still to do: paint the background with a rough, cracked appearance reminiscent of parched earth; lacquer the flames (kid mohair curls, dyed by yours truly) to the board with acrylic medium; make additional “barbed wire” and glue it to the board; and rearrange the layout according to design principles to make it look more out-of-control.

Heaven, by way of contrast, is almost finished:

Design 5A project #4, "Heaven", rough draft
Design 5A project #4, "Heaven", rough draft

This one is all about soft and wispy textures – in fact, the entire surface is padded, courtesy of some quilt batting between it and the backing board.

The only thing missing from “Heaven” is two strands of cut barbed wire, to show the ascent to freedom, through all earthly barriers.

I’m still mulling over “Earth”.  I know it will be parched earth and devastated trees on one side, green and inviting hills on the other side, separated by a barbed-wire fence, with some sense of a figure reaching longingly through the fence.  But how to compose it, I’m not quite sure yet.  I will play around with it in the morning.

Did not make another batch of paté today, primarily because I realized I was going to have to feed quite a bit of it to coworkers already.  I may make one next weekend, while testing flavors for ganaches.  I want to do a rose geranium and grapefruit ganache – or at least attempt one, and see what happens. I also need to test formulations for boysenberry and peanut butter truffles.

Somewhere in there I will also squeeze out some time for weaving…

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