Echinacea Art - Painting with Paper

My Friends are Flowers - By GG Burns

For a long time, I have admired artist who create collages or paint with small pieces of paper. Until now, I have only dabbled with this technique. After creating two exploded views of Echinacea Cone Flowers, my thoughts are this is an extremely time consuming and a back breaking method to create art. 

'A Walk in the Garden' by GG Burns

Consequently, I will no doubt return to painting with either watercolors or alcohol inks since I enjoy painting quickly with instant results. Now, I have more admiration for my collage artist friends than ever before.

First, I altered various vintages pages from old books, sheet music or clippings from garden magazines. 

Then, I painted an undercoating with acrylic paint of each flower on canvas.  

Next, I used a paper shredder, hole punches and scissors to cut up thousands 

of tiny pieces. After about 20 hours of tedious, eye straining work, the paper paintings are complete.