Mark Ryden Figures

My current crop of students continue to work hard on the 'Weird and Wonderful' project. Following on from recent lessons on Tim Burton and Maurice Sendak, students have begun to create work inspired by the 'pop surrealist' painter Mark Ryden.

Ryden is known for paintings that blend the cute and cherubic with the macabre and sinister. Though he works on a flat surface in oil paint, I wanted my students to experiment with creating some Ryden inspired figures using Model Magic air drying clay.

The following pieces were created in this material, left to dry for an hour or two, and then painted in tempera paint.