Planning for the forest

Slow leaves...

    I am not planning have leaves visible in the framing because that would be too much work and not worth it. I made only tree trunks and some small plants that would grow out on the tree trunk and bottom of the tree.
    For the tree top, I am still trying to figure out what would be a good way to create the shady look around the tree. I can carve black foam board or glue leaf shapes onto wire mesh, but I cannot ensure the final result.
    Things are slowing down here and I am feeling hitting on a wall and struggling on finding my way out. At this point, I am behind the schedule about 4 days already when I still have not everything ready to go.

This the final result of the tree trunk.

          Last night                                           Second time coloring

    These are the leaves I made and colored last night. It looks good before they totally dry out during the night. This morning when I see those leaves, I was about to scream...The color all run away from the center of the leaf and gather only on the edge with ugly pale area because of how the water evaporated. I decided to re-color them one more time and this time they are much darker when they are wet. I hope they can be the right brightness this time after they dry up.

    When time passed by, I began to get worried again, because the color are still super dark even though the leaves are almost dry. I guess I have to try to wash off some color this time and hope the best.

Trees are coming together

    The forest scene is the one I left to the end to work on, because there are too many uncertain and experiments. It was a long process to plan how to fabricate the tree into the way I want it looks like.

I started with cutting base pieces for the tree so I can put T-nuts on for the tie down. I glued poster tube with the base I made and add detail of the tree roots by craft wire mesh.

  

I only make half the tree so the it still looks fine in the camera but saved a lot work load.

This one specifically will be the tree which cat will interact with, so I left some room on the right side of the tree for cat to stand. 

After finish the detail with wire mesh, I put some hard material on the surface to enhance the shape.

Tree bark is so fun and so hard to do. Wrinkled fabric looks exactly like natural tree bark. However, it is pretty difficult to glue the fabric onto the poster tube while not changing the nice wrinkle of it. In the end, most wrinkles on the finished tree was shaped one by one...