Crafting together (the Italian project) - June

Last week our little craft club met again. While the temperatures outside were rising, we kept it cool while we each worked on our own project ;)
Jolinda added more stones to her Greek stairs and started cutting legs for a fancy fauteuil while Monique worked on a barbeque for her garden.
I started attaching the first leaves to my tree, which still might become an olive tree, but could also end up being a completely different kind of tree ;)

I'd spend the day before figuring out how to make the leaves. The paper punch that was most similair to the shape of the real olive leaves was the 'teardrop' but that one was too big. So next idea was cutting punched flowers in eight tiny 'teardrops'. Those are 5 mm, which is the right scale for the tree.

I had this green tissue paper, that I'd bought in the UK last year and I painted it with a mixture of ocre yellow, gold, brown and sap green acrylic to match the shade of the leaves. While painting the tissue paper wrinkles a bit. I just used the brush lightly so not every part of the tissue paper was covered, which made it look more natural imo.

The back of the paper might look a bit too light but it turned out good after punching and cutting the leaves :) I used cottage green with silvergrey for this side.

I had also googled for examples of old (Italian) paving, city square, old town streets etc and found this stockphoto, which I immediately fell in love with :) 

Why choose an easy paving when you can do it the hard way, right? ;)

Photo from internet

So, after Jolinda and Monique had left, I've started making a 1:12 scale drawing to test if it could work.

Also with the leaves I attached during crafting with the ladies. It may not look like much but adding leaf after leaf is so time consuming lol

I spend a big part of the next day outside in the shade drawing bricks. I loved doing that ;)

With the tree and 'mountain' on it. Already love the look of it and the real bricks will hopefully look even better ^^

The finished drawing. I enjoyed it so much that all my future projects probably end up with brick pavement as well ;)

I've cut the drawing in seven pieces because I have gotten an idea of making the brick pavement from air drying clay; not brick by brick but by making a flat surface, put a cut out section of the drawing on top and use a needle or something to puncture markings in the clay so I can 'draw' the bricks in the clay. No idea if that will work, but you never know untill you try, right? :)

Since I still wasn't all that happy with the 'spooky' colouring of the tree, I've spend some time dry brushing soft pastels on the bark.
I used the brown colours (mostly the one on the left) for the parts that were very dark and shadowy, and the greens (mostly the right one) over the high lighted parts.

For the metal wired twigs I added a drop of water with the brown soft pastel. After I was satified with the result I fixated everything very lightly with hairspray.
The colours look much better in reality imo but there you have it ;)