Paper Relief Landscape

My landscape is a city/mountain scape made out of layers of paper stacked and glued together. I was originally only going to make a mountain range but I wanted to create something more diverse. I had Chicago in mind while creating this relief because that is where I'm from and the mountains portrayed Maine to me, so kind of creating this allusion to the two places that I call home.

To create my landscape I used the Cricut, watercolor paper, a glue stick, and a magazine.

To create this piece, I began by playing around with shapes on the Cricut application. My original plan was to create an ocean scape with different land forms/buildings on the horizon, but as I continued to experiment with the layout, I decided that I liked the look of having an oval for a base with mountains and a city coming off of it. After printing out these shapes with the Cricut machine, I began stacking the shapes together and arranging them into a balanced landscape. As my project evolved, I found that I needed many many layers in order to give some depth to the shapes. This project was hugely based around working with shapes and seeing how I could combine and warp them into objects. After gluing several layers together already, I was advised to fold and glue a small piece of paper in between each layer to create more of a pop-off from the paper and provide more shadow for the relief. There is a strong sense of pattern in the city side of the landscape looking at the tops of the buildings. I was planning on pasting each layer directly over the previous one, but chose instead to stager the shapes in order to create more interest and make it appear as though there are more buildings. I used watercolor paper with the intent of using paint to give my landscape color, but as I built I liked the way the all-white looked; but, to provide interest and create contrast, I wanted to use a colorful background. I got the idea to use part of a map for the background to connect back to the meaning behind the project of my two homes. While browsing for one that I liked, I found this image of a cute little town and thought it would look cool as the backdrop for my landscape. If I were to continue this project, I would make the mountains less jagged to unify them with the backdrop, and I would add more trees and details to the mountain side.