#painted boxes

6th from the Baba Yaga box....

Loving the painted flower boxes in downtown Murray 💐

I was commissioned to paint care package boxes for a local company that works with Métis families and youth. These boxes are filled with gifts and given to youth on special events such as graduation and birthdays. It’s an honour to be chosen to to paint these sentimental gifts for indigenous youth, and I’m so excited to do more! 

5th from the Baba Yaga box....

I’m sort of dumping these pics of the inside of the box.

Baba Yaga sleeps on top if a stove mostly because it was a running joke in my family that we were always tempted tp sleep on top of the big kerosene heater in my parent’s house. The house is old and quite cold in the winter, this big hunk of stove in the middle of the living room the only real source of heat. It was almost big enough that theoretically someone could sleep on it....but it would have been a bad idea. 

The stove pipe along the backwall is simply because I didn’t want to waste time coming up with something for it. 

2nd of the Baba Yaga box....

This shows not only the nearly finished front of my Baba Yaga box, but you can see how it progressed. 

Notice Baba Yaga’s legs got redone repeatedly. I still don’t like them. The hand holding the broom was turned the wrong way at first and I changed her clothing. 

The bush with the yellow flowers was a big mistake, but only when I was finished did I realize how badly. I’d taken so long painting it that I couldn’t stand the thought of painting over it. 

4th from the Baba Yaga box....

The first set is the last of the folks on horses, this one representing night. The stars, horse, and some of what streams out of the hat are painted in glow in the dark paint. I wish I’d waited until after touch ups to take pics.

The inside lid shows Baba Yaga’s pet pig. The funny thing is I did these sketches before Ryoga, my own pet pig, wandered into my life and back then I really was indifferent to pigs. I resisted the urge to redraw the pig...because I’m lazy and you folks are the only ones who will ever see it!

3rd from the Baba Yaga box.....

These are the two ends of the box, again showing the various stages of painting. 

I honestly don’t know why I painted three people on horses with the sky ar different times of day streaming out of their hats. Maybe I remembered it from somewhere?  I had some metallic paints, so I figured why not use them here. 

Before you say anything, yes I don’t know a damn thing about horses and didn’t bother to look at photos. The box is just for me, so vaguely horse like critters was good enough. And yes, that bush in front of the person in blue is there because the legs on the horse annoyed me. It was either look at references or paint over them, and you can see which I picked. 

When I was looking for pics  I came across these  detail shots of painted boxes where I had used a quarter to show scale. 

I guess it makes my point about my default being small!