Many small projects

After the last blog describing the installation of the two trees, a lot of little projects started happening. Each one of them alone hardly seemed worth blogging about, but now I have several to catch up with. For those of you that check on the scene at school, it seems that not a lot has been going on and I apologize for not keeping you up to date Things have been happening in my garage, the living room and on the kitchen table but that doesn't seem very exciting if you can't watch it, so I've taken some photos and hope that helps reassure you that, yes, I'm still working on this project. First, let's talk about the badgers...it seemed pretty lonesome to leave poor Tuck in the burrow all by himself, so my white teddy bear donated another arm to give Tuck a sister, whom I'm naming Nip. they can keep each other warm during naptime.

and speaking of burrows, I've been working on that too. Here is an early shot of the construction, roughly carved and great stuff added.

Here is a closeup of the entrance hole:

and this was the first layer of colored flex coat. The lines you see marked on the white of the foam is me trying to determine where the different soil levels should land.

I should tell you that this has changed a lot since this photo- I added some foam to the upper area to create a more family friendly bed size and I've painted the background of this section as well as the foam block to the right of this block, totally around 8 feet of area. Now come the details and I will update with new photos as soon as I feel it's at a more finished stage.

Now another project I've been working on is the surrounding vegetation that will hopefully soften the edge between mural and 3-D structure. On the left of the mural I painted some sumac trees in the background. I want to add some actual trees to pull foreground and background together. Here is how I'm going to do that:

Here is the largest sumac. I took this picture for reference. sort of a before in the before and after transformation.

I wasn't sure exactly how I wanted to recreate the leaves, but as I studied them I remembered an article I had read about a museum diorama artist that printed out a photo of leaves onto a silk fabric printer sheet and used that to cover a wire armature for his leaves.

I know I don't have the patience to be as meticulous as he was, but I thought I could do a "down and dirty" version of this method. so...

Then, I removed each leaf carefully, leaving just a tiny nub to indicate where the replacement leaf would have to go.

Here is what the poor tree looks like stripped of all it's leaves:

Pretty architectural isn't it?

almost like a sculpture.

then I took a LOT of photos of each leaf, thinking I will be able to have a realistic diverse bunch of leaves to attach to the tree. After some experimentation I decided that I should be able to print a "set " of leaves out, spray the back of the fabric with adhesive and lay wires on the photo fabric where the main vein of the leaf was and lay another fabric over the wire, creating a sandwich that would contain the wire in between. The printer fabric is too expensive to use for the back of the leaf and not much of the backs will be seen anyway, so I picked up some light fabric in varying shades to use for the backing. Once the sandwich is made, all that remains to do is cut out the leaf and twist the center of the wire around the branch. Here is one of the close-up photos:

Here is a preliminary sheet- to save money I may try to fit in some smaller birch leaves on it as well.

I have some editing to do on this as far as the intensity of the colors. It's hard to match the real life version! also, some quick figuring as to how many of each color and size I will need tells me I need to make at least two other sheets, one predominately red and one mostly green.

I have some other projects going on as well, but this blog is pretty long already, so I will save them for the next time. I also need to go back over the calendar and count up the hours for an update for this blog. There won't be such a long time between updates again, promise!