ArtistsNetwork.com 39McCormack says he owes
much of his success to his
supportive wife—and to her
Amazon shopping habit. “I
was getting all these Amazon
boxes and started thinking
about the content,” says the
artist. “I started paying
attention to the labeling. My
first painting [above] has a
flattened box, a pasta sauce.
The idea kind of came from
Robert Rauschenberg, who
did a series of cardboard wall
sculptures, but I executed the
idea in my own style. I thought
cardboard would be easy to
paint, but it turned out to be
diffi cult in the sense that you
need certain elements and
cues to tell viewers that the
surface is cardboard.” Here
are McCormack’s top three
tips for depicting cardboard
with paint.
Cardboard Construction
- Master creating the color of cardboard. “Cardboard has a
distinct range of colors, although there’s little variation because
they’re all manufactured. It took me a day or two to mix paint
so that I could consistently put down a color that was
cardboard.” McCormack uses a mixture at 20 percent of the
mass value of the color, and uses a standard kitchen sponge to
wash it across a piece of taped-off paper, about three times, for
the perfect cardboard color. - Create realistic-looking edges and folds. “One of the
visual cues for cardboard,” McCormack says, “are fold creases.
The creases and how the cardboard is cut describes a flattened
box, like the many we’ve recycled.” The artist creates these
creases with one pass of a rubber-tipped paint shaper. While
the paint is still slightly wet, he guides the shaper by using an
elevated straight edge to produce a believable crease. - Make the labeling using hand-cut stencils and an
airbrush. Every box has lettering, and McCormack says his
lettering skills from product illustration have come in handy to
replicate them. He hand-cuts either vinyl or acetate stencils, and
then sprays over them with an airbrush to get an even color.
“Any accidents that happen when you’re creating cardboard,
such as fingerprints or unevenness, don’t matter,” he says. “It
looks like a used box.”
Rosalie Brand
Tomato Paste
From Robert
(watercolor and
gouache on
paper, 18x24)