Welcome to Sophie's Nature Art!

After a somewhat longer break, I'm posting another little blog entry today. This time it's not about a picture on a canvas. Today's picture was not painted with acrylic either. In terms of size, it is actually my largest work to date. 

The painting ground was a facade plaster and the painting medium was emulsion tinting paints. Exactly! I painted a façade! Or rather the base of a façade. To be precise, it's part of the plinth on the wall of my parents' house.
In one part of the garden, my father built a small garden railroad. As children, it was a paradise on earth for us. Covid-19 brought this railroad back to life last spring. My father had long dreamed of painting an Ore Mountains landscape as a background on the façade. Although he is a master painter himself, he didn't dare to embellish his façade. As the practice where I work was closed for a few weeks last year due to the coronavirus, I went to my parents' house. As I wanted to make good use of the time and the weather was very good, I wanted to fulfill my father's dream of a landscape in the Ore Mountains.  

So I got straight down to work. I had no idea how to implement it and how it would work. But I just got started and saw what happened. I had a landscape as a template, which served as the background for my father's model railroad layout.
It was completely unfamiliar to work with large brushes. The dimensions were also much larger. What I found particularly difficult here was achieving a three-dimensional effect, because the colors blended together very well and I therefore couldn't get any nice color gradients. But eventually I got the hang of it and created a small hilly landscape on the façade.

I painted the landscape for a week in total. Halfway through, I got a very bad toothache and a fever. I really wasn't feeling well. But I couldn't leave the façade half-finished, so I kept working. On top of that, Easter and the public holidays were just around the corner. In the end, the high level of suffering led me to see a dentist. He discovered that a nerve had become detached. I had to undergo root canal treatment. Despite this, the fever and pain persisted for a few more days. But I didn't let it get me down and continued to work diligently.

With throbbing pain and a feverish head, I painted the beautiful half-timbered house, the flower meadow and the bushes in the foreground. I also taught my father, who painted the other wall himself. So we were able to decorate the whole corner with a beautiful landscape. 

When the painting was finished, I was fine again and I was able to go back to Bavaria because we were allowed to work again. My father and my younger brother were now able to run the garden train in front of my backdrop for the whole of last year.  

It was a very exciting and challenging experience for me. Overall, the hills turned out a little too round for me. Unfortunately, I only saw that when the painting was finished. But for my first attempt at painting a façade, I'm quite satisfied.