This is a painting that I planned for a long time before starting. I was inspired by this quote by Edith Wharton (1862~1937) "Life is always either a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope". 

I know I wanted to create something that has a dreamy and ethereal feel, and I also wanted to paint a garden scene for a while, so I thought why not have my character be tiny, and walking through giant flowers. 

I also love field mice (and bank voles). They're cute little mouse, but they have smaller ears. In the end I came up with the concept of a tightrope walking acrobat mouse. 

Our little mouse's name is Myra (named and voted for by my Instagram followers). She is a mouse with big dreams and grand aspirations. I have often imagined this to be the final scene of a (unpublished and non-existent yet) picture book, where she finally became an acrobat ballet dancer, and walks into the distant light, towards her bright future :)

So for the painting preparation, I started by doing many various thumbnail and sketches, and refined them step by step.

Then I also did some basic character design sketches

and then onto the colour palette.

This was the first time that I actually took the time to properly prepare for a big painting piece. I wanted it to turn out great, and to be honest, I was a bit scared too, because I had imagined this to be a really cool piece, what if it didn't turn out how I imagined it to be?

Luckily it did! And it worked out far better than I had imagined!