New Zealand

The very small painting with the really long title

| Anna Cull
Where shadows grow long at the foot of the mountain, ghost trees shine like gold. Acrylic on canvas, 102 x 102 mm, 2014
Where shadows grow long
at the foot of the mountain,
ghost trees shine like gold.
Acrylic on canvas, 102 x 102 mm, 2014. Sold.
Ghost trees, Arthur’s Pass, original photo, 2013 — Cropped and Photoshopped, 2014 (click to embiggen)
Ghost trees, Arthur’s Pass, original photo, 2013 — Cropped and Photoshopped, 2014 (click to embiggen)

The really long title is also a haiku. I’m thinking it may be the first of a series of mini canvas + haiku combinations.

The painting is based on another phone-camera image edited in Photoshop. Good old Photoshop!

Shoot it, Sketch it: Southern Alps, Oxford

| Anna Cull
Southern Alps, Oxford – acrylic on canvas, 204 x 204 mm, 2014
Southern Alps, Oxford – acrylic on canvas, 204 x 204 mm, 2014  (SOLD)
Southern Alps, Oxford, original photo, 2012 — Cropped and Photoshopped photo, 2014
Southern Alps, Oxford, original photo, 2012 — Cropped and Photoshopped, 2014 (click to embiggen)

Question: when is a bad, low-res phone photo a good photo? Answer: when it’s the only one you’ve got. After opening my horribly pixelated image in Photoshop, I lightened it a little and messed around with artistic filters until I had something I didn’t object to looking at, printed it, and painted it. The details you would normally expect to see in a ‘good’ photo were slightly blurred and kind of painterly even before I started working on the canvas — which was an unexpected bonus because it meant not having to squint (a time-honoured technique for getting rid of unnecessary details). I really like not having to squint.