Art

Though we don't plan to order any of our gorgeous family photos shot by my friend with amazing photography skills (who is going to give me some lessons before we move away!!) or a custom art piece I created until we have a contract on a house in Tennessee so that we know what we want for particular places, I thought I would share my custom creation.

One night, Ryan and I were eating at our favorite restaurant down the street, Villa Dolce, and saw a really cool collage of photography mounted to the back of a glossy rectangle of glass.  The colors of the various photos rotated between a bright yellow-lime neon green and a subtle warm sepia wash, and the photos were of unique perspectives on various beautiful items like flowers, garden gates, or antique brick walls.  Immediately, I came home from dinner and created a similar piece using some of the digital photos Ryan had (since mine were all on actual film from my pre-digital camera days!) from our semester in London, where we met and fell in love back in 2003!  So not only is it unique art that we can customize the coloring based on what we may need for our house, but it is reminiscent of our fun semester and a special time in our lives together.

Right now, we are planning on getting the collage in black & white with the colors warmed in my Picasa photo editor, but we do have various options using sepia, standard black & white, or inspired by the rotating colors like we saw at the restaurant of a bright color (green or blue) with a neutral wash (sepia or black & white).

We also took inspiration from some art we've seen around in recent years where a cropped photo appears like a letter to spell out a word or name, and thus we recently rearranged our original collage (from 2 years ago) to spell out LONDON!

Though some of the scenes are obvious, they are as follows:
L - Big Ben clock and the Parliament buildings.
O - the London Eye ride sponsored by British Airways along the Thames River
N - the Natural History Museum, which used to be a train station
D - the marker on the Prime Meridian at Greenwich
O - the royal crest on the gates of Buckingham Palace
N - Stonehenge rock formation

Above is the warmed up black & white coloration, but as I said, I have several versions saved and can always tweak it before ordering our piece.

We plan to order this on a custom-sized canvas 9 inches high by 30 inches long, which should be perfect for a hallway or above a higher piece of furniture, but we hope to hang it somewhere where each of us can see it many times per day and always remember the beginning of our life together!

And just for fun, here is the original creation, truly inspired by the coloring of the art at Villa Dolce!