Hand cut papers layered with chipboard to created the look of a carnival themed headdress on an African American female bust. Adhered to a circular gold mat board mounted on wood. The brown tone female is featured to have short black curly hair and red lips with no other facial features seen to draw your eye back to the feathered headdress but yet to also define the gender.

"Shades of Brown" steamed from my observation and lack of various body shapes and skin tones I've seen in magazines and other paper illustrations. I've used those same magazine clippings that I felt best expressed movement, body language, and diversity in body size/shape as my stencil for the paper doll illustrations.

I've cut the figures from patterned and textured papers using current hair and fashion trends as inspiration. After assembling the papers together I then giving them all names and a personality based from someone I know personally or someone I know of. The original five illustrations are named Sean, Rick, Emma, Brit(tany) and Flo(rance). Collectively I call them the "shades of brown crew".

The original shades of brown crew and a few other paper illustrations were featured in Artomatic in Potomac, MD (2016)  and Arlington VA (2017).

Since creating these paper illustrations I've held three workshops teaching children and adults to make their own fashion inspiration paper people.

Attached here is the video from my fundraiser competition. My goal was to teach, learn, and exhibition diversity and inclusion with paper illustrations at Artomatic in Crystal City with the $500 raised. Because I was the first of the Urban Arts Leadership Program Fellows to reach my goal I was matched with an additional $500! 

In total I raised 238% from the crowd funded campaign. Soon after I started working on my layout for my exhibition, curated my artwork, and  joined one of Artomatic's planning committees. I  used my arts management knowledge gained from my fellowship to schedule various local business owners to facilitate workshops. I also scheduled myself to facilitate three collage workshops.  Two of the three were "sold out" although they were all free to the public.

I did all of these while traveling between Virginia and Maryland, freelanced as a photographer, and work up to 20 hours at my fellowship placement.

I've been working on my paper illustrations using various body shapes, themes, and brown tone papers. I would like to incorporate more illustrated backgrounds and textures with the paper people.

Recently I've been inspired by singing group En Vogue, the original and remake of the movie Sparkle, and current faux fur fashion trends for 2017 fall/winter.

The red dress was inspired by En Vogue's music video "Giving Him Something He Can Feel" which was inspired by the original Sparkle movie. The remake of the Sparkle movie features the same song with a background featuring changing rectangular LED lights. The faux fur stole and rose gold details were added to give it a more modern feel to represent current color and fashion trends. As a result I created an multi layered 12" x 12" illustration.