With all my larger commissions done, I started on 5 new Mini Vacations pieces about 2 weeks before Christmas. I hadn’t drawn or painted a Mini in almost 3 months! Then I gave myself a challenge… get them all done before the 31st! Unrealistic goal, like my goal to get 100 done in 2016… ha ha! Now the aim is to “get done what will get done”. Funny how lazy the holidays make me!

So far, I’ve finished 2 – companions to the last Mini I had done in September. So I now have 3 Italian bike-themed works.

This Mini # 56 is drawn from a 2009 photo of a lone bicycle in a small piazza in Pienza, Tuscany. Probably someone home for lunch, as we have this habit of arriving in towns at lunch time when everyone is off the streets and things are closed! And we recently kept seeing this little piazza repeatedly over the last few days, watching the mini series “Medici Masters of Florence” filmed in Pienza and environs – but no bike!

#56 – Pienza Bike – sold

This next one is from another of my husband’s Bosa, Sardinia photos from this past summer. At first it looks like this bike was locked up high on this wall to prevent theft, but upon closer inspection, it has a belt drive instead of a chain which shows its obvious age. Might be more of an atmospheric decoration, along with the fish traps?

#57 – Bosa Bike – sold

The 3 bike Mini’s together (scan and studio shots):

All these bikes and the year end so near, I feel some fitness and travel resolutions coming on!