NZ Hiking Scene Cards

You will have seen from earlier posts of mine that I love creating scenes from rubber stamps and increasingly using freehand drawing as well. I also love the challenge of starting with one basic image and then trying to create as many totally different scenes using it. I found a rubber stamp of a ‘Tramping Hut’ (tramping = hiking in NZ) and thought that this would be a perfect starting point for a series of different scenes of our beautiful New Zealand outdoor environment.

I could change the ‘feel’ of where the hut was situated by colouring the hills behind it either white for snow to light green for grassy hills or darker green for bush-clad hills. The surrounding trees and foliage could be lush dense bush, alpine trees or even tussock and rocks.

I also experimented with trying to place the hut beside a river or lake, or even a coastal scene – indicating these by the choice of plants around the water such as reeds or flax. I had a separate stamp that had a cabin beside a lake so in one image I placed the ‘tramping hut’ where the cabin was and in the other I decided to just leave the cabin.

Adding NZ birds to the scenes helped to ‘locate’ the scenes e.g. using a grey heron by the lake, a fantail in the bush and a kea (alpine parrot) in the high altitude scene.

And for my final card in this series I thought I would put chairs around a campfire outside the hut – this led to the intriguing challenge of how to colour a campfire at night. I was quite pleased with how this turned out.

All the scenes are coloured with Copic Markers.