Street Art
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.