The man who wove a magical fairytale trail in an Ayrshire park has been blown away by the response to his work.
David Powell is the artist responsible for bringing Shrek and make-believe friends to Ayr's Rozelle Park.
The 58-year-old has curated 11 incredible willow sculptures made out of willow and steel, which have captured the imagination of visitors young and old to the park.
And the artist from Girvan admits the dream project couldn’t have had a happier ending, after battling back from Covid to complete the striking works.
David told Ayrshire Live: “It has been fantastic, that is the key thing for me, my ethos as an artist is to put smiles on people’s faces.
“If you get smiles as a response it is just brilliant.
“It vindicates the amount of time and work that it took, an artist can be plugging away on something and get no response, so to have this level of response means a lot to me.”
The incredible trail, dubbed a “story stroll’ through Rozelle,” has seen iconic characters from book pages and film screens leap into the woodland trail at the Ayr park – with each character having its own connection to Scotland.
Joining Shrek is Peter Rabbit from Beatrix Potters classic tale, Captain Hook and forever young rival Peter Pan, with the sorting hat from Harry Potter amongst other surprises.
And each life-like depiction was brought to life just 22 miles along the A77 from David’s Girvan workshop– where the real magic happens.
The sculptures took between one and to four weeks to complete, with a 6mm steel skeleton being used as a framework for weaving with willow.
He said: “Each piece of willow becomes a line of a coloured pencil. I use the different types of willow to create the colours.
“I don’t use any dye. I aim for balance, I want the work to flow and be natural to the eye,” David explained, “I am a bit of a perfectionist with these things – I want things to be right.”
“The willow needs to be soaked, there are about six different varieties that I use.
“The whole point of soaking is to make the willow pliable for use, the natural colours fitting into their natural environment.
“Each bespoke piece is unique – there is nothing else like them.”
David, a former Glasgow Art School student, started weaving after using willow to construct lanterns for the Carrick Light Festival Lantern Procession and wove Fire Sculptures for the Burning Man at Girvan Folk Festival.
He added: “after that I started to weave more. I just started to make bigger and more complex pieces.”
A chance meeting with some arts school colleagues in 2008 led to the 2009 Homecoming Project for Alloway and six weeks' bending steel and welding on Ardwell Farm.
It was all part of building an epic sculpture, of Robert Burns’ Tam ‘O Shanter, which was pulled through Alloway in a procession.
“It took six weeks to produce the steel sculpture,” David added.
“By the end it was the size of a double decker bus. It was a steel form with plastic wrapped over the top of it.
“After my experience working on that I just continued to push myself, I continued to learn, you are learning on the job all the time,
Work for South Ayrshire Council, Falkirk Community Trust and a re imagining of Tam for the National Trust of Scotland caught the eye of bosses at Culzean Country Park who reached out to David to produce a a series of sculptures.
“I used to work at Culzean as a Seasonal Park Ranger.
“They approached me in 2019 to produce works for the park and walking trail for Events Scotland’s Year of Coasts and Waters.
“I was asked to think up some ideas, I drafted up a series of 17 drawings.
“But then the pandemic hit and the project was delayed, it went from being launched in 2020 to 2021.
“The Culzean project was my Covid project – it was my furlough .
“I built a dragon, a selkie, a kraken and swan as part of it, the swan pond dragon dubbed nessie has appeared on social media throughout the world.
“Local legend has it that there was a dragon in a sea cave along the coast that used to attack local villages.
“Everything there was based on ideas and drawings, I used local stories as much as possible for all the creatures.
“It was such an important project. It gave me the opportunity to keep myself ticking over.
After the success of sculptures in Culzean, David’s phone was ringing again, this time from park bosses at Rozelle.
“The skills learned at Culzean morphed into Rozelle,” David added.
“It was only meant to take four months, but Covid put me out of the picture for six weeks last spring.
“But all that time spent in the workshop has been well worth it.”
Despite creating 11 magnificent structures for Rozelle, the work has not stopped for David, with the artist also at the forefront of creating 20 illuminated structures for an Hogmanay bash in his home town.
The Strandline Illuminated Trail will see light up Girvan, as more attractions developed by David himself will tell the story of the past and present of the South Carrick capital.
David added: “As an artist I always want to give something back to the community.
“I am born and bred in Girvan and proud to tell the story of the town through my works.
“The illuminated trail draws in people not just from Ayrshire but beyond, it makes Girvan feel better for itself which is wonderful.”
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