Jim's Glider, a Story in a Painting
This is a painting I painted earlier this summer using a story as a reference. I usually work from photographs, so it was a bit of a challenge to put all the details together properly, but I like the way it turned out.
It is August 1929, on the North Shore of Vancouver, Canada, my favourite city. My husband's grandfather Jim is taking off in a glider, while his friend tows the glider in the car. Their wives, my husband's grandmother and her best friend, are looking on and waving at Jim in the plane.
I've always had trouble with perspective drawing and even more trouble with vehicles, so it was tricky getting everything the right angle and size. I used Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to create mockups with images from the internet. It was helpful to be able to cut and paste individual images and resize them when I was planning my first sketches. There is a lot going on in the painting so I tried to plan my composition carefully to get everything in to tell the story without making it too cluttered.
I used modern-day photographs of the North Shore mountains in Vancouver, and vintage photos of old boats, cars and gliders. In the end it ended up being less realistic and more like an I-spy or storybook picture, which I liked. I left out some of the details of the harbor to keep the focus on Jim and his glider, but kept in enough that the location was recognizable.
This is a very large, detailed painting, and you can see some of the detail shots below.
Here's Jim in his glider. No one was sure what color the glider was, so I made it red since it stands out nicely against the water. Jim always wore his fedora when he was flying. In the background you can see some old boathouses and the old Canadian flag, though it's very tiny.
Here are Jim's wife and her best friend watching the glider take off. These ladies are still good friends today and they were able to give some advice on the type of hats and coats they wore back then. I painted their hair and hat ribbons blowing off to the left to make the scene look windy. The flowers in the foreground are lupins and foxgloves.
Here's Jim's friend driving the car. I was not able to get any photos of him, so I made his face obscured by the reflection of the windshield. I added some tracks and dust to show the path of the car as it towed the glider. The glider was towed on a long rope that would have unhooked as the plane got up higher.
Here are some vintage boats in the harbor. I was able to find some internet images to help me with the boats and the Graf Zeppelin, which visited the Vancouver area that summer, although it didn't actually go into Coal Harbor that day due to fog.