Pixels and Paper - November Challenge!

"live gently upon this earth"

 Welcome back to a new month at Pixels and Paper!  We have a fantastic inspiration photo for you to work from for this month's challenge:

I was immediately drawn to the tree and the sense of the changing seasons.  I decided to create a canvas for my piece this month.

I began by drawing pencil lines to break my landscape canvas (9"x12") into quarters.  Next, I used Gelatos and water to create my background sky and ground.  I moved from the deep blue hot sky of Summer into the overcast coolness of Autumn, to the blustery grey skies of Winter, and into the renewing freshness of Spring.  The grass has been modified to match my impression of these changing seasons as well.  After I'd finished the 'watercolour' phase of this process, I then sealed it all using Tim Holtz' Distress 'Micro Glaze'.  This allowed me to keep building on the base images without damaging them.

Then, using the bare tree image from the 'Sheltering Tree' stamp set by Stampin' Up!, together with Dylusions Paint in 'Melted Chocolate', I stamped out my tree in all four settings.  I mixed Dylusions Paint 'Cut Grass' with some Memento 'Tuxedo Black' reinker to get differing shades of green for my leaves for Summer and Spring, and then mixed it further with some 'Melted Chocolate' for Autumn.  I also added some 'Crushed Curry' SU! Reinker for the Autumn leaves as well, and have then built each tree manually.  I added flowers to Spring by mixing 'White Linen' and 'Postbox Red' Dylusions Paint and dabbing the resulting pink randomly.

For a bit of texture, I've added smatterings of Whipped Spackle into the grey skies of Winter, as well as adding some puffy white clouds to Spring.  I also wanted to add some ribbon flowers along the lines of last month's October Training with Tone-Lill - using some 3mm pink ribbon with white cotton to gather them in.  Each of these ribbon flowers has been finished off with a small yellow rhinestone.  I also added a few other rhinestones to the paint flowers as well.

I used some dark green seaming ribbon (different to seam binding ribbon) to segment off the seasons where the pencil lines had been, and I added the phrase "live gently on this earth" from the Tim Holtz 'Small Talk' sticker book.

I can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with!

Thanks for visiting!
Deb.xx