I chose the pastoral aesthetic for my upcycling project, mainly because it invokes feelings of springtime that I am in desperate need of. Unfortunately inspiration for the actual project has been hard to come by in my day-to-day life – going outside hasn’t really given me much reference to what springtime feels like, and I was beginning to worry I’d completely forgotten the feeling I was searching for. Luckily, I was able to take inspiration from other sources than the view from my window, such as this picture I found on the royalty free photo website Deposit Photos:

The lighting of the picture is bright, but the colors are still soft and fairly muted, which is what I am looking for. After seeing this picture and doing a good amount of thinking, I decided on creating a small sculpture/set piece of a fencepost on a grassy mound. Below is a quick colored sketch of how I generally want it to look (please pardon the almost realistic grass next to the cartoonish flowers and plank, I am still learning to use Procreate).

I chose blue for the flowers since it is a prominent color in the pastoral aesthetic and the design didn’t have any blue in any of the other details.

I still wanted to do a little more with the design, so I decided to incorporate yellow lights with a small switch that can be turned on in the dark to simulate fireflies and add some more color. I really wanted to incorporate some kind of light sensor so it would do this automatically, but that would involve buying something that I don’t have lying around which goes outside of what I want to do for this project. Below is a modification to the drawing to show the yellow lights glowing in the dark.

For materials, I am planning on using cardboard to make the mound since I have been hoarding it for the last few weeks, as well as paper for the grass and flowers and a spare piece of wood from the Idea Forge. I have all the electronics I will need for it lying around already, as well as some acrylic paint that I’ve been saving for a rainy day (See what I did there? Rainy, like spring!).