Flights of Fancy
Watercolor with Acrylic gold highlights
15 x 20
 
When I came up with the idea of painting a child floating off into the air with a flying fantasy creature, surprisingly the hard part of the project was finding a pig for a reference. Despite growing up on a farm, I had never spent time around a pig. While at the library looking through reference books the librarian asked me what I was working on. I explained the painting that I had in mind and she told me that I should check out her friends' pig sanctuary. Yes, you read that right, a pig sanctuary! 
 
Piglets, Wild boar, domestic hogs that came up to my hip. My little cousin and I spent an afternoon tromping through a field with more varieties of pigs than I had ever thought existed. In a shed on the side of a field, a giant pink hog was happy to pose as my fairytale flying pig when he wasn't nibbling on my boot. The result ended up being one of my favorite paintings.