7 Wonders Swindon: Hanging Baskets (postcard)

Another fortuitous road title in Swindon, the 'Hanging Baskets of Babbington' almost perfectly parodies 'The Hanging Gardens of Babylon' one of the original wonders of the ancient world. This was probably one of the trickiest of the postcards to do and had been trotting around Hay attempting to find a good hanging basket with a white painted backdrop for me to have something to key against - I didn't fancy rotoscoping it all by hand! As chance would have it there was a very fine hanging basket outside the Bull antique shop, so I took many shots from different angles to try and find one that would work. Often it's a case of roughly cutting them out and trial fitting them to the original backdrop before finally deciding on an image to use, but it did seem to fit, even if I had to distort it somewhat. The shadow works a treat to sell the whole image and I added another couple of baskets in the background (the large red one is the same as the foreground one, just reversed) to try and sell the eccentricity of the wonder. Amazingly, right in the background is Babbington park's one and only original and real hanging basket - they are not much in abundance here yet two streets down they are all the rage.

More details about this wonder can be found on the Swindon 7 Wonders Site.

Colour postcard, unnumbered, given out on UK, US, Pacific & Canadian tours for Something Rotten July - October 2004. 1000 editions.