So yesterday I showed you how we got these pics up on our very high wall....now I'll show you what's up there and what I did with them.
This isn't going to make a whole lot of sense to non-Whovians, so I apologise up front.
So here's 'the wall' with 'the pics':
(I tell you trying to get a decent picture of all of these has been nearly as difficult as putting them up - so many strange angles and unfortunately reflective glass. The human eye can actually take them in far better than my camera could ever show you, so you'll have to trust me that these do look better in real life. Oh, and when I'm rich I'll pay lackeys to take these pictures down, reframe them with non-reflective glass and rehang them!)
That's our Doctor Who'd Van Goghs from downstairs looking up. You'll recognise Starry Night at the bottom right....and remember how Vincent lay in the field with the Doctor and Amy:
"Try to see what I see, we are so lucky to be alive to see this beautiful world. Look at the sky, it's not dark and black and without character. The black is, in fact deep blue. And over there: lighter blue and blowing through the blues and blackness the winds swirling through the air and then shining, burning, bursting through: the stars!
[the sky gradually transforms into van Gogh's painting Starry Night]
And you see how they roar their light. Everywhere we look, the complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes".
I've been trying to find a clip of just that moment. I can't, but here's a montage from the episode (so keep an eye out for other pics coming up) to help out, Starry Night is about 0.48 onwards:
OK let's try a view of the wall from the bottom of the stairs:
So far I haven't shown you any of the 'doctoring' hoho. Starry Night we left as was. Admittedly the colours in the print weren't quite as vivid as I'd liked, but this is what you get for trying to buy posters the cheapest way possible (from www.art.com and sellers on Amazon).
And if you're asking what's that tree in the photo above has to do with anything, it's the cuckoo in the nest it's true. But there is method in our madness. It IS by Van Gogh. It is in the blues and golds that are in most of the other pictures (and the blue of our sectional in the Den and the golds of our master bedroom) BUT......it's also called the Mulberry Tree......and as our lovely home back in Shropshire was called Mulberry Cottage that's well enough serendipity to justify its inclusion :)
OK, to the 'doctoring'.
We managed to get our hands on this picture a lot easier than River Song and the Doctor did....no time travel, no bartering with aliens, no dealings with Churchill, we bought it for $3.20 on Amazon ;) Although the thought of the TARDIS exploding makes me sad, it is incredibly beautiful....if you're a geek.
Then above it at the top of the wall is Van Gogh's famed Sunflowers....but yep, this one we doctor'd.
Can you spot what we did? Yep, just as in the episode, the painting now has an additional dedication on the vase 'For Amy'.
I did it by simply taking a screen cap from the video above. Luckily the camera stopped long enough on the painting. So I played the video, paused it at the right moment, hit the 'print screen' button, used 'paste' in an open Paint window, and then used the resize functions (and a few trial and error print-outs to check the size with the poster we bought) to get the 'For Amy' to the right size so that the line it's on fitted with the poster.
Goth Child gives me grief that I didn't mess with the colour of it enough to get the 'For Amy' closer to the existing 'Van Gogh'....it is a slightly more reddy brown but as it was due to hang at the top of a high wall, it was good enough. I printed out the part of the screen cap that contained the 'For Amy', cut it out as an oval so no hard edges, used a felt-tip pen (marker) to make it a little browner (though not brown enough for Goth Child) and then glued it onto our poster. Stood back and smiled.
We used a similar technique to insert a Krafayis in the window of the Church at Auvers. I took a screen cap from the actual programme this time, messed about with the size in Paint but this one I had more trouble getting the colour/visibility right. I was printing my additions out on photo paper so they kept the shine of the posters. But unfortunately this made the Krafayis at the window too dark and difficult to see from a distance (which we knew the picture would be viewed at). These are the various stages I 'airbrushed' (or rather used a virtual paint trowel) on the Krafayis:
I know the changes look heavy handed - but I was aware that the nearest anyone could get to the picture was about 2 foot away, and I wanted us to be able to make something out at the window.
Here's the finished picture:
I don't think it's too bad...Goth Child the perfectionist tells me the pillars in the window are now too light. She's right but I say pfffft to her. It's about time her photoshopping skills improved so she can do all this work for me (she's actually doing photography at High School so this is a possibly).
The last picture on 'the wall' is our doctor'd version of Van Gogh's 'The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum'. I hadn't planned to do anything with this one originally, but when the poster arrived I noticed a very interesting blueness at the left-hand side. It's actually a doorway or awning at a shop in front of the cafe, but the shape was perfect to be turned into a TARDIS:
This is where the perfectionist in me does kick in. I DO wish I'd spent a little more time actually hand painting the wording 'Police Call Box' in a lettering that looked more Van Gogh'y and more like it had been done in oil paints. But ah well, it's up on the wall now.....it's not coming down (until we paint, and I don't even want to contemplate that yet).
So that's 'the wall' and our doctor'd Doctor Who / Vincent Van Gogh gallery. There is one big hole needing a picture next to the Sunflowers:
Unfortunately our nerve hoisting heavy birch frames 20 foot over our heads didn't last. We got the pictures up that we did and then we 'neshed it' as we say back home. So the picture that opens 'Vincent and the Doctor' of the crows in the corn field has actually made it onto the wall of the Den....and because it looked lonely we bought it the Starry Night over the Rhone for company:
And that's your lot. We like it. It's colourful, it's geeky, it's quirky.....it makes us smile in the mornings coming down the stairs, and in the evening going up them. It's cool, bow ties Van Gogh's are cool ;)
Other Doctor Who posts on Fanbloomingtastic you might like:
WIP - the Third Doctor and Eleventh Doctor's costumes
Our Doctor Who Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon Road Trip pt 3 - Rory's dam
Our Doctor Who Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon Road Trip pt 1 - the beach and lake
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