Thank you for collecting one of my "Make Believe" scenes, I truly appreciate you investing in my art and I'm so delighted that the piece spoke to you.
This collection was inspired by my children. Watching them grow I have been taken back to my own childhood and have remembered how immersed in my own fantasies I could become. When playing "Make Believe", children aren't just pretending, for that moment they are fully immersed in their make believe idea.
I wanted to create scenes that remove all real surroundings from the children and place them in their own fantasy world in order to recreate what they might be imagining in their heads. I started with the photography, some of these are created from photographs of my own children and some are my friends children. I generally don't tell the children I'm taking the photo (I do ask the parents of course), this allows the shot to be natural and uncontrived.
From this reference photograph I start with a few practice pencil and watercolour sketches until I feel comfortable with the figure, I generally don't spend too long here before diving straight in to paint the subject of the piece. All the figures were hand painted in watercolour on a stark white background. Additionally I paint other background features that may help tell my story, in this case it was butterflies. I then move the images into procreate where I layer them to give the butterflies a whimsical dreamlike feel, and for the final touch I adjust the dimensions of some of the subjects to create depth to the story so that we can really dive right in.
Click on the image below to download your high res jpeg of the animation.
This collection was inspired by my children. Watching them grow I have been taken back to my own childhood and have remembered how immersed in my own fantasies I could become. When playing "Make Believe", children aren't just pretending, for that moment they are fully immersed in their make believe idea.
I wanted to create scenes that remove all real surroundings from the children and place them in their own fantasy world in order to recreate what they might be imagining in their heads. I started with the photography, some of these are created from photographs of my own children and some are my friends children. I generally don't tell the children I'm taking the photo (I do ask the parents of course), this allows the shot to be natural and uncontrived.
From this reference photograph I start with a few practice pencil and watercolour sketches until I feel comfortable with the figure, I generally don't spend too long here before diving straight in to paint the subject of the piece. All the figures were hand painted in watercolour on a stark white background. Additionally I paint other background features that may help tell my story, in this case it was butterflies. I then move the images into procreate where I layer them to give the butterflies a whimsical dreamlike feel, and for the final touch I adjust the dimensions of some of the subjects to create depth to the story so that we can really dive right in.
Click on the image below to download your high res jpeg of the animation.
