Married in Meribel

Sometimes I get asked to paint pictures for weddings, so I’d like to tell you about a project which was a bit more unusual, and further afield than my home patch of Northumberland.

This picture had an important job to do. It was a celebration of the beautiful location, but also a map for the wedding guests to navigate their way around the village, to their hotels, and to the various wedding locations (including a barbecue brunch in the forest!). I wasn’t able to travel to the French Alps (a pity I know) and so I was relying on notes, maps, photos and Google.

I was given lots of helpful photos of Meribel, and a couple of existing maps, which were a bit less user-friendly…

So I spent quite a long time figuring out where everything should go….

This is where the hardest work goes in. It ends up looking simple but there is a huge amount of re-thinking and re-drawing at this stage. Google Earth wasn’t helpful this time as all the paths are narrow and obscured by trees. It took a lot of emails and some trial and error before I achieved a reasonable idea of the landscape.

Here’s the pencil drawing. Changes still occur at this stage: the marmot was happier on the right side rather than the left, and the family’s villa was placed in its correct position.

This is the final painting. I tried to create a sense of space by using warm, gold green for the foreground, my go-to green (Hookers) in the middle and cooler purples and blues in the distance. The wild flowers were a welcome splash of colour which I reflected in the compass, and the red plane was a gift!

Everything had to be delayed a year because of you-know-what, but I’m happy to say it went ahead in the end. The guests enjoyed using their maps, and the bride and groom have the original framed in their home. I was lucky enough to see some of the photos and I can only describe it as a real fairytale wedding.