This image is not photoshopped. When I get down to the dregs of my silk paint, it sometimes comes out of the bottle as bubbles. I just thought this looked cool. It’s also fun to watch the change when you add another colour. Anyway, back to painting!
The street in question is Hornby Street in downtown Vancouver. The art would be the tree, but is also a reference to Vancouver Art Gallery in the background. I was struck by how gorgeous this and other trees around the gallery looked on a sunny day back in May.
After hand-painting the background, I used free motion machine embroidery to represent the mulched soil in the foreground. The tree trunk and branches are also worked in free motion with a little hand-sewing here and there. With the trailing twigs, I found the less I cared about how they should go, the better they looked.
As described in my previous post, I hand-painted a bunch of narrow ribbon strips for the leaves of the tree. Then I hand-stitched the greenery using ribbon instead of thread. Thankfully, silk is less fragile than it looks!
This picture changes depending on the light more than most. In the evenings under a spotlight, the sheen of the ribbon comes into play, hopefully to capture something of the sunlit glory of the tree as I saw it that day.
