This tie was a birthday present to my mother, an outright Queen fan at that time. I tried to adapt the album cover "A kind of Magic" to the dimensions of the tie, limiting the group portrait to its lead singer Freddie Mercury.
| date | Jul 1996 |
|---|---|
| time | 3 days |
| object | blank white silk tie |
| technique |   |
First, it was crucial to apply a special silk coating (for watercolor painting) to the tie to avoid runny colors. Without, it is not possible to paint any details, because even the small amount of color applied with the airbrush is immediately soaked up by the silk; each line becomes blurred and increases threefold in width.
I used cardboard stencils for Freddie's jacket and face. For the delicate "Queen" logo, the fishes and letters, I cut stencils from adhesive plastic foil (normally used for wrapping books), because it's impossible to fix these small pieces with magnets. I did a lot of experiments to be able to create the colorful sparks and glitter that appear throughout the motive. Finally, I used some bent copper wires and bits of paper glued to a piece of a curtain. I sprayed the dark background over those stencils (keeping the stencils in place with my hand), then I removed the stencils and filled the blank spaces with various colors. Fortunately, the dark background graciously forgives being painted on.
Queen album cover "A kind of Magic"
Note: These high-quality images take some time to load. Some images are sized to fit the page width, so try your browser's full-screen mode or resizing the browser window. If you want to view the picture in full detail and zoom into it, save the picture and use another imaging application to view it.
The images by Ingo Karkat on this page are licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
