First I put silver paint over the sketches of the trees that I showed in an earlier post. It took two layers of silver to make it stand out a little. Silver paint is so translucent!
After the silver I crackle medium on the trees. I took no picture of this, because the medium is translucent and it would not show on the picture anyway. After the medium had dried I put on another layer of acrylic paint. Titan buff this time, which is a lovely off white color.
It's a pity you can't really see the effect on the picture, but the titan buff paint crackled to give the trees a wonderful structure and through the cracks you can see the silver paint. Not as much as I intended to unfortenately, but I was still quite pleased with the crackling ;-)
After all this tree painting (imagine painting the same trees four or five times, sigh) it was time to make some extra collage material for the leaves I wanted to put on the trees. I took a couple of sheets of music paper and painted it several colors of green with gouache.
I really like the effect on the paper and I may do this for other projects as well. Pretty paper was never so easy to make, haha! I drew leaf shapes with a drawing pen and cut them out. I didn't even need all the sheets of paper so I still have some left that I may use in one of my journals. I put the leaves on the trees with gel medium.
Just to show you a little before and after effect I put a finished painting next to an unfinished one. As you can see I added some other stuff as well. I added these fabric shiny little flowers and butterflies I had lying around and also some silver .... jeez, what do you call them....those little glimmering metallic things? Anyway, they really reflect the light very nicely. All of that stuff was put down with gel medium as well (where would we be without gel medium?).
After putting on a million of those little items (well, it FELT like a million, but I'm pretty sure I'm overstating things) the trilogy was finished and now it looks like this:
You can't really see, but the sides of the paintings are painted in silver as well. And also (and if I sound stuck up saying this you can tell me), the picture doesn't do it justice. It's way more vibrant and glittery in real life and I believe my niece said she wanted some bling, so that should be good. I am quite proud of the result and I am also quite relieved it is finally finished! Back to small work for me, I'm way better suited for that, haha.
Lastly I want to give my thanks to all of you who have sent me your sympathy, either on this blog or elsewhere about the death of my cat. It is much appreciated, thank you so much. I was quite surprised that even my vet sent me a sympathy card today! I thought that was so nice of her. People can really surprise you sometimes.