Eggs (I Only Gave You Some) for Shopper!

Eggs (I Only Gave You Some), graphite on archival digital print

Eggs (I Only Gave You Some) Graphite on archival digital print 20 x 16 inches framed, $895 2014 by Sarah Atlee - some rights reserved

Shopper! The Art Show A Curious Collection of Found Shopping Lists & Artists' Renditions of Those Who Made Them

Curated by Tessa Raven Bayne

When: 16 August - 14 September 2014

Where: Hancock Creative Shop, 116 S 2nd St., Guthrie, Oklahoma (map link)

Take a decade's worth of found shopping lists, add visual artists to reimagine the lists' authors, mix with writers spinning colorful tales of these shoppers, and you get a collaborative summer art show that's sure to deliver.

The shopping list that inspired Eggs.

The shopping list that prompted my imagined portrait.

Eggs (I Only Gave You Some), detail view, graphite on archival digital print

A closer look at Eggs.

I created Eggs using an experimental process. I began by taking hi-res scans of ledger paper, moving the paper around during scanning to achieve interesting distortions. I printed the resulting scan onto several different high-quality inkjet papers. Using a range of soft pencils from 3B to 9B, I tested the tooth of each paper to see which surface held up best. I settled on Hahnemuehle Museum Etching.

The drawing is based on a collage sketch:

Eggs (I Only Gave You Some), collage sketch, 2014 by Sarah Atlee

Many different sources went into this conceptual mockup. Photographs of Evelyn Nesbit (who inspired the Gibson Girl image), the New York Public Library's Maps archive, and postcards from Google Earth, just to name a few.

As I predicted, the distorded grid of the ledger paper background image informed and melded with the shapes I drew. I'm very pleased with the results and will repeat this process for future drawings.