Masked Marvel

UPDATE: The Peeps hath spoke... No mo Picto. Thanks, Guys!
Here's yesterday's progress montage, already rendered moot by today's, yay!

Fantastic stage of things here. I applied the last of my entire stock pile of FlexAll cement to the tree (and won't buy more as this phase could go on endlessly.) It is tree-mendous fun creating the "bark " texture with this particular product, wowwie.

I added wood trim to the step edges and plastered them into the tree bark too, as was the cabinet and all the hearth tiles. After the tree gets painted, and the masks are removed, I'm hoping all of the details will look "grown" into the tree itself. The idea is that the tree has grown into the middle of the cottage through the ages. The roots have become part of how the house functions for its owner.

Some of the areas of the tree's cement texture are looking so lifelike, to scale, that I'm thrilled. It looks like real bark in some spots. Fantastic. It's nearly ready to paint. After I mix up a few batches of regular plaster of paris to finish sculpting the roots on the tree's outside, I'll need to go get a larger quantity of brown and taupe acrylics. I'm planning a Nova Color run this week for that.

I debated whether to slice the tree branches into re-assemble-able sections at this stage vs. after it's all finished. The question being which stage would result in less destruction when the tree will, at some point, have to be transported out of here. My mind said now would be a better time to deconstruct the crown in two or three sections and install a board and dowel peg-system of some kind so the parts could be reassembled when needed. But my gut sez no, keep going, don't stop, fix it in post, otherwise you'll be waylaid too much with this sort of never-ending technical task. (My gut happened to be connected to Paul's mouth as he said as much when I asked him for his opinion.)

ART BONUS
I have several thank you cards to write, and for one of them I wanted to make another of the wonderful paper pop-up lotus flower cards designed by Tatyana Stolyarova. But my printer is broken (I dropped it a few months ago) and I couldn't find the pattern pieces anywhere.


I can't believe this worked! I took a piece of clear acetate, taped it to my monitor, brought up Tatyana's pdf on my screen (set to the size I wanted to boot!), traced around the pattern pieces with a Sharpie, cut them out of the plastic, traced around those onto hand-painted watercolor papers, assembled, and voila!