In the late fifties or early sixties, my dad dug out the slide projector, aimed it at a canvas, and projected a 35mm Kodachrome transparency there-on. The picture was a pastoral woodland scene, trees, leafy boughs, a deer in a lane looking at the photographer. Dad sketched in the outline of every branch, every leaf, the deer, the dappled sunlight on the forest floor, and he took a paint by numbers kit and matched the oils by tint to what he saw on the canvas. Methodically, he assigned a color value to each area in his sketch, and then he began to paint. It wasn’t the work of an afternoon. He was down there in the basement sketching and painting evenings after work for some months until he was ready to unveil the work.
Between his meticulous attention to detail and his subject matter, the finished piece looked - to me - like it came straight out of the Disney studios. It was realistic, and it had a romantic cartoon quality.
Paint-by-numbers was a pop culture fad in the fifties in America. Dad’s DIY paint by numbers effort was not unlike these.
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