red van in the morning...

three white vans, all in a row...

I've been not working on something I started and which I expected to have finished before now. But I thunk wrong. And so, to tide me over until it's done, here's this sneaky preview of something from the undone thing...

Northern Lights

In Finland, the truth about the northern lights is well known and has been spoken of since the earliest days of Väinämöinen. A fox ran across a benighted fell, a deep, fresh cover of snow reflecting moonlight and illuminating the night. Fox swept and beat the snow with his brush, sending sparks into the sky, and this is how the northern lights are formed, and why in Finland they are called revontulet - fox lights.

This is an illustration I did for a teaching pack on scandinavian culture. I posted the unpainted version ages ago but never got round to posting this because I'm not altogether happy with how it turned out. I perhaps tried to be too literal in my visual interpretation of the lights. Now I come back to it after several months, it is better than I thought but, if there was time, I'd try to redo it. It will probably go in the teachers' pack as is though.