Garden Railroad: Pennsylvania Through the Four Seasons

I collaborated with Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens to create a wall containing a several carnival game scenes for their Garden Railroad exhibit. Because the piece spans six feet, the composition was designed as a continuous panorama, allowing viewers to “travel” along the scene the way a train does, discovering new games and seeing miniature figurines interacting with the games as their eyes move across it.

On tracing paper, I created a light graphite under drawing to map out the carnival games so it can compliment the miniature scale of the figurines and model trains. I then transferred the graphite drawing to the wooden board to begin creating the carnival game scene. After transferring, I used gouache as the base layer and then built up the the shadows and details to give definition to each carnival game with colored pencil.

Garden Railroad Display Photos Courtesy of Paul g. Wiegman