Everyone invited to paint by numbers in Peachland
Alarge painting depicting a bit of Peachland history is taking shape at the town’s art gallery, 6.5 square centimetres at a time.
Members of the public are invited to help create the 1.8-metre-by-2.1-metre canvas artwork by daubing specified colours inside 6,048 tiny squares.
“You don’t need any artistic ability to participate,” Deb Livingstone of the Peachland Community Arts Council said Sunday. “You just have to apply the colour or colours that are specified for each square inch.”
Once all the squares are completed, the resulting image will show a slice of Peachland life, based on a photograph taken in 1918.
A distinctive eight-sided building, then a church and now the town museum, is in the foreground. Opposite a road on which a horsedrawn carriage is shown, industrial and fruit-processing buildings line a waterfront that’s now parkland.
The SS Sicamous, a sternwheeler that once plied Okanagan Lake, is shown at the town dock, preparing to sail northward to Kelowna.
The mass-painting effort, suggested by arts council member Shelley Sweeney, has two purposes. One is to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, and the other is to set a Guinness World Record for the largest number of participants painting a paint-by-number scene at one venue.
The 6,000-plus participants required by the end of December is not unreachable, Livingstone says, since the Peachland Art Gallery is located inside the town’s visitor information centre, which had more than 9,000 visitors last year.
To achieve the goal, about 30 people a day will have to paint one of the squares.
The project started last Friday. By Sunday morning, about 80 people had taken up a paintbrush.
“We’re off to a good start, and I think it’ll really pick up as word gets around and the tourists start coming,” Livingstone said.