Pine in progress

I’ve been wanting to depict this pine tree on our street for a long time, so it’s nice to finally get going on it. The photo is a nice start but I’m going to leave out the distracting trees behind it and tweak the colors. 

Here is the sketch on tracing paper, not too detailed but gets the idea across:

I started with a plain piece of some generic white cotton fabric, then globbed a lot of acrylic paint onto a silicone-treated sheet, one of the ones made for ironing appliqué. I folded over the sheet a few times, added more paint, etc. then laid the white fabric on it and pressed down.

This is interesting, but is too dark and contrasty, so the next step (after letting it dry thoroughly) was to brush over some lighter, semi-opaque paint. I also added some metallic copper paint. This is more like it:

Here is a close-up of the painted background:

Acrylic gel was used to adhere the fabric to a stretched canvas, then it was allowed to dry. (Note: if I was going to go in a more quilty direction, I would skip that step.) Next I transferred the sketch by using my weird method of taping the sketch over the canvas and drawing underneath it onto the canvas with a watercolor pencil. Next, the outlines of the tree were painted on:

I plan to paint in some color then use a few if the collage papers shown in this post to complete the tree. But, we’ll see what actually happens!