Branching out

Sorry, couldn’t resist! My husband Andy and I recently took a little trip to visit several Florida state parks, including Big and Little Talbot Islands. I shot quite a few photos looking up into tree canopies, mostly oak and pine trees. The twisting branches of live oaks are amazing, like a bonsai that just kept growing.

The shot above is the cropped photo that I used as the basis for the artwork. While I’ve worked mostly in soft fiber art mode in recent years, I wanted to try “hard” collage using acrylics for this piece.

First I sketched the image onto a 12" X 12" hardboard (an Ampersand pastel panel that was hanging around), then painted the basic shapes with black, lavender, and white. After drying, it was time to add...

...some pieces of fabric from my stash. I set up the easel to lay flat so quite a few pieces could be laid out before being stuck down. The adhesive is Clear Tar Gel gloss by Golden, but other reasonably thick gels also work. 


Hmmm... a problem became evident about midway through. I take photos along the way, which has become vital to my process. For some reason I can see things in the little display of my camera that are not apparent in the artwork right in front of me! The lavender was too similar in value to the green leaves, which made the image lack contrast. So, I painted over most of the lavender with white acrylic, though it still shows through.

More fabric pieces were added plus some tiny bits of painted papers. Though perhaps a few things here and there could be changed next time around, I like how it turned out. 


This is becoming a bit of a roll, because the wolf from a couple of weeks ago was also satisfactory. While that may not sound overly enthusiastic, if I am not happy with artwork-in-progress my reaction is along the lines of YUCK, THIS IS AWFUL!!!! Having created over the years more than a few pieces of artwork that “went ugly” and couldn’t be rescued, this is a nice change!