A Real Leaf Plain as Day

 

A grand 1/2L illusion, just a chewed leaf at first, reveals another message upon a closer look.

A well-eaten leaf saved from my garden has the title card for Akt 2, "Day," hidden in its munchouts.

It can be shown on a tree directly or via cast shadow in the strong light of the afternoon.

As there is to be no written language in Halfland, at least not overtly, I'm making a handful of exceptions in a super fun 1/2L manner. You see it in the hand-sewn "halfland" spider web in the banner art for the blog above. And here today, another example is the skeletal veining of a leaf forming the three-letter word "Day" to mark the beginning of Halfland's second (of four) chapters or Akts; Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Dark.

Accomplishing this bit of magic was only possible because my dear art friend Maggie Rudy gifted me a tiny spool of hair-fine wire years ago that she had salvaged from a small motor. I formed lengths of it into loose lettering and coated them on both sides with an absorbent ground to lift the color of the wire to white so it could be painted down to match the actual leaf's beige when dry. I anchored the letters on the reverse side of the leaf with daubs of tacky glue and let them dry. I left tiny chew mark textures in the lettering to better blend them into what the caterpillars had done. Once painted, I found the illusion of the insect's work matched well with the new word. And when I cast the leaf's shadow in the sun, the word "day" read as plain as, well, day!

PS: I initially tried to create these title cards digitally by illustrating the objects, webs, and leaves in PS and compositing them into the long shot of the setting. No matter what I did (which is a lot), they fell flat and looked fake, so I had to finally accept that Halfland things have to be built and made in real life to work correctly and feel natural. That's the magic in it—that an unreal place can be made to feel real.