Okay, slowly but surely I’ve been working on my little trees. Now I have a deadline so it’s going to become fast and furious. There are only two steps left (well, three, actually) and they’ll be completely done!
Here’s how they look now:
(That one on the end has been finished for months; I finished it up so I could show it off to people.)
I would love to be able to say that these trees represent a specific variety, like oak or rowan or something romantic like that, but the fact is, because I am very, very lazy, I used the leaves from a silk garland I had lying around, and this one with the generic leaves was the only one that seemed appropriate in scale. I pulled the leaves off one by one (well, okay, they’re in clusters of three, but one cluster at a time), and glued them on each branch. If I hadn’t had a garland, I would probably have used a leaf-shaped paper punch from the scrapbooking department and at least two shades of green paper, maybe in vellum or some other translucent variety.
At first, it always seems like they’re going to be so sparse I’ll have to go back and fill in later, but then when they’re done they look just fine. There are about 73 twigs per tree, in case you were wondering. I counted.
I originally tried to use white glue for the leaves, but it turns out that silk leaves are actually made of nylon, and instead of behaving like a porous material that should adhere to white glue, it acts like a non-porous plastic. So, basically, everywhere I took the first one I finished, little leaves dropped off it and fluttered to the ground like in Lothlorien. I ended up taking all the leaves off that one, touching up the paint on the branches, and then reattaching them with Goop (because I couldn’t find the e-6000 glue at the store). That seems to have done the job.
While I was working with these trees, I realized the paint was rubbing off the bottoms of them as they got moved around. So I decided to add some feet and some felt furniture sliders to protect them and whatever surface they end up living on. I’ll include some pictures of that process next.
Next up: Sewing the cushions! Silk velvet and upholstery foam galore! Expect more reports before the end of the week.
Hi! It’s me! Remember me? I’m still alive. I’m so disgusted with myself that it’s been a year since I started my forest thrones project and they’re not done yet, that I’ve been hiding out from the blog. Real mature, right?
Money’s been real tight around here, but I got some cash for Christmas and spent it on some LaDoll clay. See, I ran out of the paperclay I was using for my trees, which was irritating because I just needed that much more to finish the little details. So I decided to come up with some other projects to use the LaDoll with before it dried out. I bought LaDoll this time because it’s stronger than paperclay and I wasn’t happy with the performance of the paperclay in some cases.
Anyway. It took a while to work up the nerve to work on the trees again, so I decided to ease into it by doing another project first … and then these mushrooms happened. Maybe I’ve been playing too much Plants Vs. Zombies.
Trixie is unimpressed by the giant mushrooms.
The flowerpots are mini terra cotta pots which I painted and distressed. I want to learn to upcycle furniture, but the idea scares the heck out of me, so I’m starting with baby steps. I’m thrilled with how these came out, so I’ll be distressing more painted objects from now on.
So then I filled the pots and built the mushrooms. Okay, I have a confession to make. Their armatures are paper. The stems started as paper lollipop sticks and the caps are index cards. Then I bulked them out with Model Magic, which is horrible of me but I had a bunch of it lying around that I got for cheap. The LaDoll is strong enough that using these lightweight materials inside doesn’t seem to have made a difference.
See? They’re quite strong. I even dropped one on accident and it was fine.
Then I painted and glossed the shrooms, and dressed the “dirt” inside the pot with model train landscape fuzz for moss and raffia grass. If you look carefully, you can see they each have a little rock in the pot, too. I was going to add more stuff, but I think they look good like this. I added the lace and gold ribbon to the pots to draw the white down a little, unifying the colors and such. I have an art degree, leave me alone.
The scale thing kind of makes me chuckle… they’re giant mushrooms for the doll, but in reality they’re about life-sized (modeled after the ones that grow in my yard). Trixie is about ten inches tall, if you were wondering. The rabbit is wood and I don’t remember where it came from. I swear it isn’t blurry in real life, but it came out that way in all the photos.
The topiary is an old ufo I finished up last year while waiting for glue to dry on my forest thrones. I’m planning to make several more of them.
Meanwhile, I promise I’ll finish up the trees soon. I want to take them to a show in May.
So, when last we saw my trees, I had just finished drybrushing them. The next step in this endless tree project is to add the details. I’m going to make some details out of paperclay, and then I’m going to make grass out of raffia and apply silk leaves.
This particular tree has a long, shallow space on the front of the base, so I decided to add some shelf fungus to add interest without taking up any room. I sculpted them in paperclay and added them with white glue. I think this project has at least four kinds of glue on it.
(That’s not a spider in the picture. I’m not sure what it is, but I think I would remember a spider.)
After the paperclay dried, I painted it up and then I added a mushroom, also sculpted from paperclay.
(See? No spider.)
The mushroom is also attached with white glue. I thought I might have to drill some room to add a pin inside the mushrooms, to hold them on better, but actually they’re so small that white glue has done the job perfectly.
Now, for the really good part. I figured this technique out a long time ago. I take raffia (which, ironically, is made from a kind of grass, I think) and cut it up into the right lengths for grass. It looks like this:
No, those are not dried up old green beans.
Then, after cutting, I peel narrow little strips off until I have grass-like shapes.
I make a pile of those, and then I put a lot of white glue on the base.
Then I add the blades of grass, one at a time. I know, it seems like you should be able to do a bunch at a time, but it never looks right when I do it that way. I pat the grass into the glue with a tool; this time I’m using a piece of bamboo skewer. Technically, a toothpick probably would have worked better, but I’m just too lazy to go look for one when there’s a bamboo skewer right here.
Rinse and repeat until you get all the way across the base.
After the grass is rooted, I mix a little green and yellow paint and quickly paint the grass so that it isn’t the same color all over.
Hmmm…. apparently I failed to take any pictures of the grass when it was all done. Here’s a photo of another niche with painted grass and a couple of paperclay rocks.
That’s all for now — next time I’ll show you how I apply the leaves.
Here’s what I’ve been doing this spring.
My best friend, Sariah’s birthday is at the end of March, and I forget it EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. So this year I started thinking about what to get her at Christmas. I found this fabulous little merboy pendant from Green Girl Studios. Sariah loves mermaids and babies and I knew she’d love it. The only thing was, it was too big for her style of jewelry. So I decided to put it on a leather cord and add some seashells, and she could hang it on her wall in her bathroom, where she has a seashell theme.
Somehow, that spiraled out of control. I ended up making a beaded, seashell-encrusted environment for the merboy. It has two layers of felt for backing and fits in a six by four shadowbox frame. It was a lot of fun, and it looks a lot prettier in person than in this awful picture.
Besides, Sariah loved it, and that’s all that matters.
I know it’s weird, but I really love the back of this piece. I kind of have a thing for freeform needlework, though I don’t actually do any of it, and I love the rhythm of the stitches back here.
Then I realized my niece’s third birthday was coming up, and I needed to make something for her. When I asked her what she wanted, she said, “Tinkerbell.” So I made her a pixie. I haven’t made a cloth doll in a really long time, and this one I made from scratch, so I’m very pleased with how well it came out. I angsted over the wings for a while but eventually went with felt for them, too. I used cable ties to stiffen the wings, and I inserted one in her neck because she wouldn’t hold her head up. The face is embroidered — which came out surprisingly well. From now on, I’m doing all my embroidery at 4am the night before — and the hair is sort-of embroidered and sort of… what would you call it? Appliqued? Anyway, the braids were made separately and sewn on.
I thought it was pretty cute but it kind of got lost among the other four thousand gifts she got that day. That kid has more friends at age three than I’ve had in my entire life.
I hope you’re having a productive summer. Thanks for reading.
Well, I have painted all of the trees and drybrushed three of them. I know it’s hard to get an idea of size from photos, so I snapped some pictures with my Petite Ai, Sebastian, who is 28cm (11 inches) tall.
I intended these trees to be sized for MSDs, but I think they came out a little short, even with the additional height of the cushion. Oh well. They look pretty good anyway.
Okay, you’re right. They look damn good. I’m so close to being finished now.
Not much to say about this step. If I ever do something like this again, I’m going to tint the Sculptamold before I start. It took forever to fill in all the little holes and crevices.
Since I don’t have much to say about this step and I know you guys are expecting some witty repartee, I’ll leave you with a photo of my paint palette.
I use cheap, party-sized paper plates because, well, I’m cheap. And I don’t mean that in a sexy way. Besides, they’re waterproof, just the right size, and they come in packages of one gazillion. Unfortunately, they were out of plain white ones the day I bought these, so I still have a gazillion minus a dozen or so to use up.
I might have mentioned this before, but there are two kinds of artists in the world. The first kind of artist is the perfectionist. They’re the ones who never let a painting go because there’s still stuff they want to do to it. They’re the ones who alphabetize their painting supplies. The good ones never stop working until their art is amazing. They do fantastic, detailed work, but sometimes they lack creativity.
The other kind of artist is the dabbler. Everything the dabbler does is an experiment, and they never do the same thing twice. They tend to be laid back and have fun with their work, but they also tend to leave a trail of unfinished or failed projects behind them. They do wildly imaginative, innovative work, but sometimes they lack focus.
I have a theory that you can tell which kind of artist you are by your paint palette. Guess which one I am?
I suddenly remembered I hadn’t painted the undersides of the trees, so I took a moment to do that.
I also went over the trees, filling in the worst of the gaps in the texture with paperclay. I also filled in around the bottom so it looks properly attached to the ground, and the place where the roots overhang the edges of the base so they would be nice and flat on the bottom. Once I add a little gloss, it’ll look amazing.
Now I want to show you how to drybrush a sculpture. Drybrushing is a technique that uses layers of paint to emphasize the features of a texture. It mimics the way light and shadows fall on something full-sized.
First, you need to gather your tools and supplies. Drybrushing is hard on brushes, so you want to use an old, cheap, or previously damaged brush. A large, flat brush is a good choice, but really, whatever you have that you don’t mind getting messed up. Then, select a paint for your tree. The paint that you want to be the overall impression of color for your tree (in art we say that it “reads” a certain color) is going to be the middle tone. After you choose that color, you need to choose (or mix) a darker color and a lighter color. You want the darker and lighter colors to be shades of the middle color or as close to it as you can manage. (Go ahead and use black to mix your darker color. I would probably argue that it’s a cool color too, but it’s okay for the darker shade to be cooler than the others. Cool colors tend to fade to the back.)
Now, start with the basecoat. Take your darker color and paint the entire piece thoroughly. With a high texture like I have on my tree bark, I watered the paint down a little so it would go into the crevices easier, and I had to do several coats to get all the little white cracks and holes. But trust me, you want to do that now because it’ll be a pain in the neck to do it later.
The second coat is your true color. The one you want everyone to think your tree is colored. Put a little paint on your brush, then work it in by “painting” on your palette until your brush is loaded all the way through. Then, wipe off most of the paint. You want your brush to be almost “dry,” hence the term “drybrushing.” When your brush is ready, start painting by dragging your brush lightly from top to bottom, or whichever direction your light source is coming from, letting it put paint only on the peaks and plateaus of your texture. Think of it this way: the dark color is the shadowed areas. Now you’re painting everything that isn’t a shadow. You’ve probably drybrushed before, on accident, when you were running out of paint on your brush. This is the same idea.
Here’s my piece after the middle coat:
Now, you might think this looks pretty good, but we’re not done yet. Now you take the third color and, using the same drybrushing technique, paint another coat. This time, you’re only trying to paint the parts of the texture that are high enough to be highlighted by your light source, so make sure it’s a lighter coat (in the sense of covering less territory). Like so:
I’ve been doing this for years, but I still get a kick out of how it breathes life into a dull paint job. The photo doesn’t convey as much depth as the piece has.
As an aside, do you see what I mean about the instant papier mache making the perfect texture for faux dirt? If I wanted to be even more realistic, I’d probably mix some other colors into my base coat, like a yellow ochre or black. But I’m going to cover all this up with grass, so I don’t need to get that realistic.
That’s it for today. More pictures of trees next time, I promise.
Okay, I FINALLY got all those little branches sculpted. So now we move on to the next step: painting.
First, I want to discuss some color theory with you, because color theory freaks out a lot of crafters who don’t have a fine art background. The first thing you should know is that this is art, not science. There are no wrong answers, just ones that don’t suit your needs. So relax.
When you were in fourth or fifth grade, you probably learned about the color wheel, and the primary, secondary and tertiary colors, right? Your teacher probably told you that you make brown by mixing a primary color with its complement. This is the first lie I want to expose.
In a theoretically perfect world, you probably can make brown by mixing complementary colors. The problem is that you can’t make paint out of theory. Paint uses pigments that come from natural things, like earth or plant matter, or chemical processes, and nobody told the earth (or your chemistry set) that it needed to make a pure blue or a true yellow. Earth has better things to do anyway. So most pigments are not true, primary colors. The result being that if you mix a color with its complement, you will most likely get a nasty, warm, troll-snot gray.
But there’s some good news. Remember I said pigments are made from earth? And what color is most earth? Brown. There are lots of brown-pigmented shades of paint that are cheap and easy to get ahold of. If you insist on mixing your own (or the mental institution will only let you have five tubes of paint), the best way to get a nice, warm brown is to mix black with orange. The brightest tangerine orange you can get will work best. (And by the way, this advice may not apply to media other than paint, such as colored pencils or even ink, but it should apply to all types of paint, since most of them use the same kinds of pigments.)
Now let’s talk about the second lie your misguided art teacher told you (give her a break, she went to college for four years so she could scrub tempera paint out of her hair every night!). You probably learned that there are warm colors, cool colors and neutrals. Warm colors are the ones that make you think about fire: yellow, red, and orange. Cool colors make you think of the ocean: blue, green, and purple. Neutral colors are mainly black and white, though some people classify brown as a neutral as well.
The truth is, warm and cool isn’t nearly so well-defined. Sure, yellow is always warm and blue is always cool (except in relation to other shades of themselves), but you can have a warm red or a cool red. You can have a cool green or a warm green. And brown can be either warm or cool. Warm browns have undertones of red or orange, while cool browns have undertones of blue, purple or gray. In fact, one way you can think of it is as a continuum, with terra cotta on one end and gray on the other. Warm browns, on the terra cotta end, will blend almost seamlessly into a true red, while on the cool end they blend to gray (remember our troll-snot gray we got from mixing complementary colors? Here’s where it belongs).
Cool browns are really ugly. Really slimy mud and baby poop are usually cool brown. Hot cocoa is one of the few nice things that are cool brown. I tried to get some cool brown paint at the craft store to show you, but out of scores of different colors they only had a couple of bottles that I would consider a really cool brown, and they were so dark, it was hard to determine whether they were warm or cool. Ugly paint doesn’t market well, I suppose. Plus, it’s really easy to make a cool brown, as we will discuss below.
The other part of this lie is that black and white are true neutrals. Maybe they are, in the sense that they don’t clash with any other colors, but if you are mixing paint, let me tell you a secret. Never, ever, ever, lighten a warm color with white. Not if you want the end result to stay warm. You lighten warm colors by adding yellow. You can use a really light yellow that’s mostly white, but the more white you add, the cooler your color will get until you get back to troll-snot (will somebody get that troll a hanky? Please?).
I made a color chart for you below. The darker color is a cool brown and the lighter color is a warm brown. I hope you can see, as I lightened them, that one has kind of a purpley undertone and the other is mostly orange. (You really have to develop an eye for that with practice. I can’t tell you any tricks to it.) To prove my point about white being a cool color, I lightened each color by mixing it with white and then with yellow. As you can see, even the cool brown came out warm after being mixed with yellow, and the warm brown turned into a cool gray when mixed with white.
Finally, let’s talk about trees. You need to decide if your tree came from a happy, warm, bunny-filled summer forest; or a creepy, chilly, fog-filled winter forest. You want to use a warm brown for the former and a cool brown for the latter. I’m going to drybrush my trees to maximize their texture, but I’ll get into that in the next post.
I hope this little intro to color theory hasn’t freaked you out too much. I’m really not an expert on these things — I just have a two-bit art degree and the experience of being a graphic designer and crafter for more years than I’m likely to admit here — it just pains my heart when I hear people fret about color theory, because it’s really easy, and you really can’t do it wrong. You just need to experiment and develop your own judgment, taste and style.
Not much to report. There just isn’t a fast way to do the paperclay on the branches.
I wish I could be more informative on this part of the tutorial, but it really is just trial and error, and if you have some previous sculpting skill, like I do, that helps a lot.
So, to give you something to look at, here is a picture of the tools I’m using. The metal ones are wax carving tools. The big paddle is good for slapping paperclay on the big branches and for making the lines in the bark. The little one is better for maneuvering in small places. Wax sculpting tools are a bit hard to find, so if you don’t have any, you could probably get some good results with a plastic spoon or a palette knife. I also use the smallest knitting needles I can get as sculpting tools.
The paintbrush is an old cheap one with stiff bristles, so I’m using it to add texture to the smooth branches.
Finally, I recently received the silk velvet for the seat cushions and I’ve been dying to share it with someone. It’s so yummy! I ordered it from Silkfabric on Etsy, and I couldn’t be happier. I will probably be cursing it when I actually try to work with it, but right now I just can’t get over how pretty it is!
Sorry I’ve been on hiatus; real life attacked me.
First, I wanted to show you a picture of my setup. When I’m working on a relatively large, detailed project like this, I use an old lazy susan to keep my desk clean and to let me turn it without touching it. Furthermore, I find that after focusing on anything table-height for very long, my neck starts to hurt, so I use a big block of basswood to raise the project to my eye level.
So I’ve gotten the trees to the point where they’re ready for their actual faux bark skins. The trunk part of the tree will be covered in Sculptamold, a product made of instant paper mache and plaster of paris. I intended to make the bark texture using a technique I learned a while ago from my friend Mary West, but I made a mistake. You see, it’s a little tricky mixing the Sculptamold, and the first batch didn’t have enough water, so it dried out before I could get the texture done. Sooooo… I decided to do two of them that way (so everyone would think I did it on purpose) and do the texture on the other two.
Here’s how the texture works. It’s very simple. You just take an old fork (you can get them at the thrift store for cheap) and draw lines in the wet Sculptamold. Make all the lines going generally up and down, but make sure they aren’t perfectly straight. The next row can be a little off from parallel, and if you get one tine in an old row it’ll guide them along to look natural. The lumps in the product will make these organic-looking bumps and changes in the texture.
It looks really good when it’s done.
The other tricky thing about working with Sculptamold is that no matter how much product you mix up, you only have a few minutes to work with it before it sets. Plaster of paris hardens with a chemical reaction, so there’s no going back once it’s done. However, if you’re like me, it’s never a bad idea to have a pile of premade “stones” on hand for projects, so when I had too much leftover product and it started getting too stiff to use on the trees anymore, I just formed it up into lumps and let it harden. Later I’ll paint them and use them in other projects.
Next up: Paperclay on the upper branches. This is the fun part, where it really starts looking like something! Thanks for bearing with me.
Okay, I really wanted to show you a comparison between a throne with its branches posed and one that hasn’t been posed. Sometimes a detail like this makes the difference between a high-school quality craft project and a professional-quality art project. (Aaaand the unintentional TV sampling continues. That’s none other than Alton Brown, who is apparently so impressed by my trees that he’s trying to reach out of the TV to pet them.)
But how did this miraculous change occur, you might ask? Well, it’s simple. First I made sure each of the main branches made a subtle s-curve BOTH front-to-back and side-to-side. The front-to-back curve is vaguely similar to a chairback. Then I made each of the secondary and … uh… third … ary…? branches curve generally upwards and to the back. Then I fussed with them until they all looked right., making sure that none of the branches were flat in any dimension.
As you can see in this profile shot, all the branches are pointing backwards. This is not due to artistic sensibility so much as my Kid Delf, Cleo, who informed me that if she got her hair caught in any of the branches, she would kill me in my sleep. And I find it’s just easier to go along with her. O.O The point, though, is that you need to consider a sculpture like this from all angles.
And finally, my friend Caroline wanted a closeup of the branches, so here we are. Obviously, they’ll gain a lot of bulk as I add more layers, but it’s so fiddly adding stuff to them I probably won’t do any more layers than I really have to.
Now picture these branches with a leaf at the end of each twig. It’s going to look way cool.
