Spring Tree Trio - 18"x24"

This is my first big baby. Unlike all the others tree/branch pieces, that were much more simple, this one I worked on off and on for over 2 months. There are a few visible problems and I may never try to sell this piece but overall I was pretty thrilled with the results.

The sky was painted with the same colour of acrylic blue but I slowly added white as I got closer to the ground, once finished I overlaid with a layer of tissue. I used 3 different colours of green textured mulberry (150 gsm) for the ground and tore it to the right shapes for a softer, grassier looking edge. The trees were cut, once again from a standard brown cardstock,if all the leaves fell off, there would still be trees with ALL the branches underneath, I do this to get a more real, organic feel with the leaves and then accents were added with acrylic paints. The leaves are two different colours of Indian Batik (100 gsm) punched with a craft paper punch. Flowers on the trees were punched from a pearlescent white paper and accented with paint in the middle. The clouds were a white fibery paper torn by hand. The ground cover was tiny torn pieces of yellow batik.

Major lessons learned on this piece

1) If you are overlapping mulberry be sure that the pieces underneath cover the entire area of ground all the way to the bottom of the piece. I used lighter greens over darker greens and you could see the lines from the paper underneath (easily remedied next time).
2) Mulberry is very absorbent, ended up with weird discolourations from the glue all around where the ground cover flowers (yellow) are. Coat the ground with acrylic gloss first to get a more even look of the mulberry, that way, when you go to add the flowers the glue won't soak into the paper thus avoiding the weird glue discolourations.
3) TEST your paper. Some papers' colours will bleed. I almost ruined the whole thing by applying the gloss on the trees finding the green of the leaves bleeding into the blue of the sky. Quickly switched tactics to just applying the gloss on the tree, letting it dry and then applying coats of gloss to the entire picture once it had dried and sealed. Next time will either gloss the whole background first so I can wipe off any colour bleeding without any trouble or gloss the entire tree before applying it to the piece - whichever works better for on the next occasion.