Somewhere Near Kicking Horse Mountain

Whenever I make and sell a large piece, it takes me a while before I can revisit it. But it's not until I decide to go there again that I remember the work, the effort, the loss of sleep and the time that I devoted to that one piece. You'd think it would be easier, but no. So I let it slide to the back of my mind and the bottom of the list.
However, I received an awesome kick in the pants this morning to get back there.

My brother in law, forwarded me a photo from one of their guests who had purchased my last Takkakaw Falls effort and couldn't wait to show how wonderful it looked in their home. (It does!)That's a plus for me, as I don't usually hear from people who own my work.

 

So I put aside the challenge piece and returned to BC.

My husband and I visited in Sept 2011 and most of my vistas that I reproduce are from his photos; Takkakaw Fall and this next one of my sister.

 

Who can remember what she was looking at but the shot of colour in the early autumn woods still thrills me with it's jolt of pure red. Now I love this picture but it doesn't do justice to the trees. I can fix that! As I had never done a photo transfer before I though this was a good subject.

Pure colour with the edges disappearing into trees and small shrubs. I can do that!

A friend made the transfer for me almost a year ago, and I've sat on it waiting till I had the confidence? and impulse to tackle this one. And as usual a hundred decisions had to be made before I started.

I scoured thru all the photos looking for similar landscape, but do think I could find another with a birch? But knowing their growth habit, the birch does not grow like a conifer. But it will be close to the last tree that goes onto this piece, so I can sleep (haha) on that.

The one thing I had decided was while the evergreens were going to be primarily net based thread work, the small shrubs and deciduous stuff were going to be snippets, under netting.

All the possibilities come out and on to the table.

There is a lot of green vegetation here, so, to make my life easier I started with 2 fillers plus sky over most of the background. At this point the photo transfer is added to get the best position for her action.

Then I started adding TREES.

 

Some are "behind" all the greenery and were anchored immediately. Some are truncated because their bases "disappear" behind the deciduous trees and shrubs.

And some are large and rise out of the photograph. Colour is pretty good but a little thread or crayon or paint at the end will blend them.

The photo is an 8x11 so the background is close to a metre in height.
The trees look like trees and the figure emphasizes their height.


Along the way I started adding some autumn leaves. They're underneath the bigger trees and for the most part are just colour, no detail.

The background trees need to fill in and almost completely obscure the sky. The netted foliage is dark, almost black. And there's lots more to come.