Gallery of Mythical Creatures Project

For a long time I was thinking about making some sort of an art project out of different white frames. First I wanted to arrange a few empty frames of different sizes and different design, but all white on a white wall. But then I decided against it, because empty frames seem a little bit morbid to me. I don't know why. Looks like somebody removed all the pictures.

Still, I was determined to make that assorted white frames project a reality and as a first step I went to a dollar store and bought six different cheap frames of the same size. They didn't look pretty together, but it didn't bother me much.

Then I removed glass and everything else from the frames, laid them on a plastic poncho on a balcony and spray-painted them with white enamel.

Now the frames started to look like a part of the same installation. Although some of them required a few coats of paint. So with all the rain we were having, it took me three days, not a half an hour as I have expected.

Now I needed six very similar and graphic images to counterbalance the diversity of frames' designs. I generally like this trend with printing and drawing on book pages, because the text create a strong graphic background for and image, but as your normal former Soviet Union girl I absolutely can't stand when people cut books for craft projects. Especially when they cut old books and call it "recycle". How can I explain... For me it's like tearing a Bible for wrapping groceries. We do not desecrate books.

Fortunately, we always can use a scanner. Which I did. I scanned six pages from my big dictionary and layered images from Medieval books over them. I managed to get six low resolution images for free thanks to a generous collector, but if you want to make a bigger scale project you can easily buy similar images in a very good resolution from the stock sites.

And that's it, basically. Newt I spent a good portion of my Saturday morning arranging the pictures on the wall symmetrically (not an easy task!). But I am fairly content with the result, and my imaginary dining room now has some sort of a virtual definition: here, in front of the bestiary gallery, is the dining room, and further along the same wall is what we call a living room.