Welcome to Sophie's Nature Art!

In view of the autumnal mood in Saxony, where I am currently staying, I would like to present one of my two latest works today. It is a colorful autumn scene. 

A few months ago, one of my best friends asked me to paint a picture like this. The original plan was to paint this picture in the fall as well, but so many other things came up that I only did it now during the Christmas vacations. 

This picture is ae premiere. It's a completely new technique that I hadn't dared to try before. Most of the painting was done with a palette knife. It was painted on 20x30cm cardboard in acrylic. The painting was inspired by the Belarusian artist who died last year Leonid Afremov. He is considered the author of this art movement and created many beautiful works throughout his life. In his work, he used bright, cheerful colors and loved to paint couples in an autumn landscape. To get an idea of how to recreate a painting like this, I looked at a Youtube-Tutorial on. Using this video as a guide, I made my first attempts at painting with the palette knife. After a few attempts, I was surprised that it went so easily.

As a lover of detail and realism in painting, it was a bit of a challenge for me to capture only the rough impressions and see the big picture instead of getting bogged down in details. However, as I had a model from the tutorial, I was able to recreate it. When I painted in the details such as the parking lamps, the bench and the trees with the brush, I was amazed at the effect of the picture. The couple then added the finishing touches to the composition.

Unfortunately, the proportions of the lamps didn't work out so well for me. I'm just as dissatisfied with the contrasts. But it's also difficult to emphasize details in such a colourful picture. Overall, the picture was finished quite quickly, within half a day.  

But the day still had a few hours left and so I painted a second picture, a twin so to speak. A fraternal twin, though. Because the second picture couldn't have been more different in terms of motif and technique. But more on that in the next post... 🙂 

Although today's picture is a happy one, I would like to share a brief thought on the subject of death. Leonid Afremov is dead. He died of a heart attack on August 19, 2019 at the age of 64.