Quaranteeny Art Show
I had way too much fun entering the “Quaranteeny Art Show” competition earlier this month. Everything about this contest appealed to me: tiny art, to-scale models, animal figurines. @tinyartshow is one of my all-time favorite instagram accounts to follow and they inspired me to go smaller with my needle felted landscapes. I recently launched a new “mini” landscape size (3”x3”). When I saw Tiny Art Show was hosting a tiny art show competition (during COVID-19 Quarantine), I knew it would be a fun & imaginative way to play around with my own art for an afternoon and more importantly, an excuse to make miniature stuff to go with it all.
I had my collection of 8 wool paintings made & framed fairly quickly. I’ve been needle felting larger landscapes for awhile now, so these little guys were done in record time. However, I needed a gallery setting and a scale figure for the contest, and that took a lot of thinking and experimenting. I’ll admit I wandered around the house for a bit, looking at corners, ledges, any flat surface, really. I finally settled on the kitchen counter because the white quartz countertop looked like terrazzo at the scale I needed, plus the under-cabinet lighting would provide semi-realistic shadows. I propped up two pieces of white foam core and mounted my tiny pieces of art work.
I decided to go a little further with my to-scale gallery. I added some pedestals and a tiny vase, and made miniature stanchions using dowels, red yarn, and thumb tacks. Now, for my scale figure. It HAD to be a sheep! After all, the art in this exhibit is made entirely of wool. I used a little lamb figurine I got at the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair a few years ago (made by Collin’s Creatures), and set my art-loving creature in the gallery for a look around.
The collection of mini wool landscapes featured in the tiny art show has already sold out on my website and more are coming very soon! I’m thrilled with the response these tiny wool paintings have gotten so far and can’t wait to share more these with my collectors. Take a tour of the tiny gallery and experience the show for yourself!
Now here’s where a good thing gets even better. I submitted my work to this contest for fun, I encouraged other’s to do the same, so all in all it was a great time. But then to top it off, I won first place! I still can’t believe it. There were so many fantastic applications I actually made myself wait to look at what other’s had done until after I submitted my own because I didn’t want to get discouraged. The judges had their work cut out for them!
