Vintage Life Turns Fantasy Sketches

by Terry Grimaldi
(Brooklyn, NY)

Does this eerie image look like alien fantasy sketches? I attended the annual Outsider Art Fair held in New York City recently, which inspired me to do something in the style of Henry Darger, who may be the poster boy for Outsider Art. The photo of a 5-year-old Chicago murder victim inspired the war in Darger's life work a "15,145-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript called 'The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion', along with several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story".

Basically he created his art by clipping pictures out of discarded magazines and then tracing them or having copies made of them. So what I did was to get a copy of the photo. It's a really poor quality reprint of a grainy newspaper photo from the Chicago Daily News, May 9, 1911. I played around with the sizing on a photocopier. Instead of scanning it and doing photo editing, I attempted this approach for a diffused look. Then I digitized the photocopy. Using photo editing software I experimented with coloring and exposure until it looked other-worldly enough.