Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Boreal Twilight


For quite a while now I've been using "Google Street View" and Google Earth to virtually tour places I will never see for real. These places are in far northern Canada, a vast, almost unpopulated area of countless lakes, hills, mountains, and rivers. Google Street View didn't run its image-capturing wagon through the wilderness but it has archived hundreds of photographs taken by explorers or visitors and has placed their links on the map site where the photo was taken. I've seen the boreal forest, the taiga, and the tundra. They are wondrously empty, expansive spaces, lit with the slanting golden light of an arctic summer. In winter it is all snow and ice for thousands of miles, with occasional polar bears. The good thing about these virtual tours is that I don't have to contend with the vicious swarms of Arctic mosquitoes. If there were a way to protect against the mosquitoes, I would consider visiting these places myself. I want to see vast open territory and big skies. 

I tried to evoke the Arctic landscape, the taiga, in this iPad miniature. I did some work on it in Photoshop in the main studio. I am working on depicting an environment or scene in a minimum amount of time and a simple design style. 
"Art Studio" app on iPad, February 19, 2013.

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