In this new tutorial I’m handing over the creative decisions to you ~ and if you’re feeling particularly creative you can decide to design EVERY element of this tutorial to make it completely personalised.
I often get asked how I come up with ideas for projects (of which, I have an ever expanding list). Some ideas come from a single photograph or a place I have visited and others from an accumulation of ideas which have been swimming about in my head. This project is one of those!
Growing up in the 1970’s I was fascinated by a children’s television production of Heidi (which I think was dubbed as the voices never really matched the spoken words of the actors!). Thanks to Heidi (and possibly Grizzly Adams ~ another 1970’s TV show), I always fancied living in a little Swiss cottage or log cabin ~especially if it had a hatch in the roof where you could lay and watch the stars above! This childhood memory is possibly where the ideas for our painting began!
I’ve been lucky to live in the Surrey Hills for most of my life, and the one thing that I love to see are the houses nestled amongst the valley trees. Where I grew up, it was often referred to as Little Switzerland (see the Heidi link), possibly because the winter snows tended to be worse than the surrounding towns and villages and possibly because of the steep hills that are peppered with houses and pine trees.
So it is perhaps no surprise that the idea of little houses peeping from amongst the trees is another inspiration from where I live. I particularly love to see this little white house, which seems to sparkle on the hillside when I spy it across the valley as I drive home from the school run. I think this little cluster of local houses is particularly cute with their asymmetrical rooflines.
I’ve been thinking about including little hillside houses into a painting for some time now, but the style and technique was eluding me. It was only recently that my ideas came together following a late September walk. Looking at the leaves on the ground, I noticed that so many of the leaves actually look like tiny trees! This was the inspiration I needed to bring my ideas together. I collected lots of different leaf shapes and then used their silhouettes and simplified their shapes to create individual tree icons.
As for the style; one of my favourite mugs is covered in cute folk art designs ~ inspiration can truly come from everywhere and anywhere! So not wanting to copy existing Folk Art elements I decided to design my own trees (based on my collected leaves), my own houses plus some wildlife.
This is such a cute little project as you can include as many or as few trees, houses and animals as you like. So it can be any size or format, which means it can be adapted to suit how much time you have.
Once your designs are complete you can decide on your own colour palette ~I'm going to let you curate your own scheme here so there are no colour clues from me, but you could have an autumnal theme as shown in the worksheets or a winter theme as seen in the videos. But you could decide to go with your favourite colours, monochromatic, fantasy colours, Nordic colours etc. etc.
To find out how all of these elements finally come together, take a look at the short video below.
You can have so much fun with this project and adapt it to create a wide range of styles which would suit any occasion. You might like to think about designing your own Christmas card or perhaps make a bookmark and gift it to a friend. It would even suit younger ones ~ if you fancied enjoying an afternoon colouring in you could use the outlines to create your scene and use colour pencils or felt tips to add colour (if you don’t want to let them at the paint!).
Happy Painting!
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