Friday 2 May 2014

The Tale of Peter Rabbit


This was of my favourite books as a child and my mother used to read it to me a lot as she also grew up on Beatrix Potter's books. These were originally my Easter nail ideas but as I was a bit delayed I decided to paint them the following week for my mum's retirement. Now she can finally relax and maybe make some Beatrix Potter tales of her own.
I wanted to paint these in the order of the story but didn't quite think it through how they'd be displayed and got them a bit backwards, so I've flipped the images below to put them in the correct order:


From left to right I have a basket, a robin on a shovel, Peter wearing his nice new blue coat, carrots, a robin looking at Peter's lost shoe, a sparrow flying away from the fence, a watering can, Peter after he lost his coat, Peter's coat and shoes displayed like a scarecrow and a hot pot of camomile tea.

These nails took a long time to paint as I wanted to get the detail of Beatrix Potter's paintings just right. To do these I painted a white base on all my nails, then painted the detailed drawings first before adding a light stipple of colour to the background of some of the images to create a watercolour paint look. I also used dark browns instead of black to create the outline of some of the images so it looked more painted and less harsh and cartoon-like.

Coming next, "On Wednesday's we wear pink."....

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