Shuswap

I'm sure we can all remember making cards for friends and family as a child.  I know I produced all kinds of weird and wonderful creations as I was growing up.  As I got older I began to develop my own style and started to produce pictures which I could scan and print to use as cards.  I started out by working from pictures I had found in magazines, often of wildlife or landscapes.  These two pictures marked a change as this is the point where I turned my attention to producing art based on my own travels and experiences.  People often ask to hear the story behind the pictures (or at least that's what they tell me) so I thought I'd start this blog to share some of those stories.  

Shuswap Lake is in British Columbia where we took a family holiday back in 2001.  It was a fantastic trip involving the Californian, Canadian and British branches of the family.  Being a somewhat far flung family, we don't manage to get together all that often making this a particularly special holiday.  During the days we spent our time exploring the lake and the surrounding area but it was the evenings that stayed with me.  I remember sitting around a campfire in the front garden of the lake house every evening drinking, chatting and catching up on too many years living in separate continents.

The view across the lake was beautiful, particularly as the moon reflected off its surface.  I'm not an expert photographer so I did the first picture by taking photos during the day standing on the spot where we had the fire.  I used this to recreate the view and then changed this to a night scene when I got home.  The sunset is based on another photo from the same trip, taken from the lake shore.  Both pictures are watercolours.  For those of you who were on this holiday, I hope they'll bring back some happy memories.