30 in 30 challenge - Day 2

The challenge for today was to create a tree using only your fingers and a business card.  I used this picture that I took at Ecola park on the Oregon Coast, with Haystack Rock in the background as inspiration.

I tried to stick to the prescribed tools, and did fine with the tree trunk, but when I started adding branches, I found that the business card was just too big to use for making small adjustments.  I went back to using my rubber spludger tool and was much happier.

I started, as I said, with the tree trunk and clean up it's edges using the business card.  Then I started adding branches.  At first I was being kind of literal, trying to copy the tree in the picture, but I soon gave up on that idea and just tried to mimic the general shape and density of the tree and branches.  I used the rubber spludger to clean up the branches and create forks and thought it looked pretty good.  Then I used just my fingers to sprinkle in some foliage. I'm reasonably happy with the results for the tree.

I thought that putting in the ground area under the tree and background area would be relatively easy, but it wasn't.  The biggest challenge was trying to figure out how to have Haystack Rock not get lost in the mountains behind it.  I wound up creating an unnatural halo around it to separate it.  I suppose that the right way to do this would be to use different densities of powder coverage for the rock vs the mountains, but I don't have that much control.  Perhaps with multiple firings, one could build up the density of the rock to make it stand out.

In any case, I had fun creating this image and was pleasantly surprised that I was able to make a respectable looking tree without too much effort.  My normal style of glass artwork is the exact opposite of organic, because depicting nature has always intimidated me.  I'm too much of a literalist and that gets in the way when you're trying to do something that has infinite detail.  Hopefully this 30 in 30 challenge will help me break out of that box.