Into the Woods

I was inspired by the TAIF blog challenge this week - the Woods - so yesterday I printed out some "woods" photos of the Okeefeenokee Swamp and of Asheville NC on Dan's printer. I decided to use one of the Swamp pix as inspiration so I decided to paint a tree background. I used watercolor paper and laid down several pieces of masking tape of different sizes as masks. I painted the background with a watered down version of acrylic greens, blue and brown. then I pulled off the tape unfortunately ripping up some of the paper on the lower part of the page. I then used drybrush brown paint on the trunks and filled in with gray and black colored pencil. I then did the layout including gluing on the photo etc and hated it. I ripped off all the stuff and cut down the paper - Dan actually likes the result of just the trees so I told him he could have it for his study.

So this morning I took a different approach. Still using the Swamp pic as inspiration, I cut a tree from black paper (Scherenschnitte style). Last year at this time, Amy Karol on her http://angrychicken.typepad.com/ blog was into Scherenschnitte and recommended some books, one of which, Scherenschnitte by Susanne Schlapfer-Geiser, I got on ebay. It's an awesome book with great instructions and photos of her work (she also has a blog which is pretty cool). I freehand cut the tree using the folded paper style of work. The layout then just did itself - I thought of the stamp from the DR with the trees and I repeted the color of the little channel marker with the flower. The big button is actually wood. I went online and found that cool line of poetry - you can always depend on poets to have written something cool. I really wanted to use the dark teal of this cardstock but I only had 2 pieces of it that glued together would make 12 inches (this paper is from an old old paper company sampler that a paper saleman gave Dan when he working for a printing company). I didn't like the look of the jointure so I added scraps of vintage fabric and a scrap of black paper.

Now I need to go into the kitchen and bake Christmas cookies. Dan requested both sugar cookie cutouts and shortbread like his Scottish grandmother used to make so...