Soap Bubbles

Soap Bubbles | 72”x 24” | Oil on Canvas
 
“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Little Tommy knocked over my bottle of soap bubbles, and it all spilt out.”
“Oh, mommy, mommy. Oh, mommy.”

Perhaps you remember how it felt to have a sibling or cousin knock over your bottle of soap bubbles just when you were having such fun swinging your arm, or twirling around, with a trail of magically beautiful bubbles streaming through the air behind you. Feel the joy of chasing and popping them before they hit the ground.

Imagine the restored happiness when mommy kneels down to hug you, and hands you a new bottle of soap bubbles. She knew little people sometimes knock soap bubble bottles over. She kindly counsels you to be more careful with this one. And you, perhaps less kindly, pass that counsel along to “Little Tommy.”
 
Soap bubbles are such a source of joy, to all us kids, big and small.

My online search for a vintage soap bubble bottle and its vintage label netted only one result, an image of an upright bottle with the label facing forward. I had hoped to find and purchase a bottle so I could position it as desired in the composition. What I did was position a different “new” bottle and then redrew this foreshortened view of the vintage label onto the canvas.

Back ‘in the day’, the bottle lids were metal. For this painting I repurposed a lid from an old metal can of glue, clipping off the glue swab stem from the lid’s inside, and giving the lid a couple coats of gold paint. The lid was not the right size for the bottle, so I calculated and drew the lid to the correct proportion to the bottle.

The wand which came with the ‘new’ bottle of soap was neon green and the ends were molded in a complex ‘gear-tooth’ sort of way. The wand in the painting was drawn from my own childhood memories to fit the vintage look I was after for this painting.

To set up the composition, I placed the various items on the driveway, placed my camera on the ground to get the desired point of view and used a remote to snap the pictures. Armed with several extra bottles of soap I spilt it onto the driveway so I could get the natural look and reflections I desired. As the soap would run, I would periodically pour out more soap. During this photo shoot I was also blowing bubbles, lots of bubbles, from which I could later pick and choose.

As it turned out, even with all this preparation and set-up, a lot of decisions were made during the actual painting process. For example, The soap bubble bottle I photographed was red, not blue, and the color of the wand was not decided upon until after the background, bottle, lid and their reflections were painted. I also determined late in the painting that some bubbles needed to be altered in placement and size from my earlier compositional drawings.

I am pleased with the results, especially with the sense of joy that immediately comes when one looks at the painting. Soap bubbles really are a source of wonder and happiness.
 
“You should have the Art you Love”