Playmobil Painting

In 2014 I didn’t make a lot of paintings, because I had to study a lot. But there is one painting that I would really like to show you. Most people know Playmobil and a lot of you even have played with it when they were young.
Since I have a son of 2 years old, slowly more and more toys are winning space in our house.
So one day I saw an advertorial from Playmobil and an idea popped into my head. I would make a Playmobil painting/piece of Art.
I took a canvas and started painting 11 different coloured strokes on the canvas.
In the meantime I went to our attic to find the few Playmobil dolls M. had when he was younger (haha he didn’t know I did that, because of course he wouldn’t give me permission to use them). He only had 10 or 12 so basically nothing (I already counted that I needed at least 300 dolls).

The next call was to my brother, but he had to do a search for his Playmobil Dolls and expected that he would not have so much.
I found a couple of dolls in the stores, but realized that this way it would become a costly painting.
One of my friends gave me a tip to go to Cranenbroeck, a local store here in the south of Holland. And indeed we found a couple of Playmobil dolls, but we had to assemble them ourselves. The price was ok, but the problem was that it was hard to see what kind of dolls were in these bag. And I had in my mind that I wanted to have all different kind of dolls.
So back home we tried to find out if we could see some differences in the numbers on the packages. And we did. So M. (who became enthousiastic in the search process) went back to the store, and laid down all the different bags on the ground (haha could you imagine him sitting on the floor with all these bags). And even one of the saleswomen helped him with his search. So when he came back we had around 100 dolls.

Hmm but still more than 200 short, so I needed a new strategy. I started searching on Marktplaats (this is the Dutch Ebay). We drove to all kind of places in Holland, and every time more Playmobil came with us then I needed for my painting. Haha Larsman will be thrilled when he becomes 4 years and can finally play with al the Playmobil we already have;-).

When I had a couple of dolls I started sewing the Playmobil with fishing wire on the painting. And at the end of 2014 it was finally finished.
It’s hanging on the wall of our kitchen, a real eye-catcher. So funny when people see it, most of them never saw so many Playmobil dolls together (331 pieces). There are all kind of knights, clowns, soldiers, beach boys, Maxima and Willem-Alexander (our Dutch Queen and King, see photo above), Sinterklaas, Santa Claus etc. on it, and of course M.’s old dolls. I sometimes hear him proud saying to his friends that his old dolls are also on the painting;-).