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| 'Sunrise and Silence' - Acrylic on Canvas 23.5cm x 30cm |
This week, I've had a real urge to paint a landscape in acrylics based on the Big Skies, Little Planet idea just less whimsical but still not entirely realistic. So I had a go at creating a landscape that came pretty much entirely from my imagination but that was inspired by the real landscape up here in the far northern highlands. I made up the sky, added some hills and decided to include the ubiquitous wind turbines which are, for better or worse, part of the landscape up here these days. They proved the most difficult of all with S pointing out, just when I thought I was finished, that they should be symmetrical, and mine weren't. Cue much huffing and puffing and trying very hard to re-do them without ruining the sky in behind them!
By the time I fixed them up as best I could the light had gone out of the day so apologies for these photos - they're pretty grainy.
Anyway, apart from the wind turbines, I'm quite pleased with the result. I just really enjoyed slapping the paint on and using my new favourite technique of paint spatters for wild flowers at the bottom and stars at the top. It was refreshing to go with my intuition rather than studiously working from a reference photograph. I have assigned S with the mission of photographing cute cottages/hilly landscapes/amazing skies so that I can build up a reference library though, as I think I'd like to do more of these landscapes.
Sticking with the Big Skies, Little Planet illustrations, when I was at John O'Groats with my sister last week, after seeing the choice (or lack thereof) of souvenir fridge magnets on offer, I had a light bulb moment where I thought perhaps if I could turn my little illustrations into magnets I could maybe sell them to some of the local shops. Seeing what was currently on offer, I reckoned there was definitely a gap in the market for quirky fridge magnets and so, I ordered a bunch of blank plastic fridge magnets on-line and have made them up from 12 of the different scenes that I did.
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| Big Skies, Little Planet fridge magnets |
After work on Thursday, I took 12 (one of each design) into one of the local shops, Eye Candy, which sells lots of lovely and unusual locally crafted goods. They bought all 12 from me with a view to ordering more if they sell well!
I'm going to try a few other shops as well and definitely take some up to the souvenir shop at John O'Groats that helped spawn the idea in the first place!
If you want to catch up with my other post in the last week, here they are:
I'm linking up with Paint Party Friday and will try to visit everyone I can over the weekend.
