Romanian Winter Hayride (Virtual Paintout)

After rambling around Romania, seeing beautiful summery farmland, busy cities, and a shepherd walking his sheep down a village street, suddenly it was Christmas with nativity scenes in front yards and this wonderful snowy hayride (virtually, of course via Google Streetview for the Virtual Paintout).

Yesterday I’d tried painting a different Romania scene (below) but soon realized I was laboring joylessly on a hopeless painting, fighting paint the consistency of toothpaste. I gave up, scraped off the panel (glad I’ve gotten smarter about when to cut my losses), and returned to Google’s wonderful new MapCrunch.com where I found the above photo.

Today I started over, using regular oil paints (ahhh the glorious, buttery, creaminess!), telling myself to pretend I was painting plein air (instead of from an image on my computer monitor) and that I only had 2-3 hours to complete the painting. I also made a point to stop before I felt it was “perfectly” finished to avoid overworking it.

On Google’s new MapCrunch you pick a country and then click “Go” to be taken randomly to Google Streetview scenes in that country where you can scroll around 360 degrees or click your way down the road. Wandering Streetview is so realistic that a couple of weeks ago I was thinking about a little seaside village on top of a hill that had a sign for cave tours and was trying to remember when I’d been there or exactly where it was. Finally, a couple of hours later I realized it was an Irish village that I’d explored on Streetview but had never seen in real life.