Tree with character

Tree with character, but not a tree character. This immediately made me think of bonsai trees. Every single one is unique and like a piece of art to admire. They rarely grow straight up and their chunky trumps
weave in interesting ways. For this task, I really wanted to recreate a bonsai tree.





I started off with a sketch and the idea of making my tree in Maya. The initial plan was to create a base mesh and then attempt a sculpt in MudBox. The 3D model was taking me way longer than expected. I was doing it all by hand, extruding and twisting each set of faces. Once I got to the branches it got clear that this wasn't a good way of modelling trees. Later on I learned about some tools in the animation tab in Maya which would have helped me do this in 5 minutes rather than 5 hours, but that was too late. Abandoning the 3D model, I moved on creating a 2D piece.


I looked at some more references. I found these little bonsai trees made out of wire and really liked the silver look. These became the inspiration for my second try on the tree with character.

Again I wanted to try something a bit different and new. I wanted to make a flat 2D tree, like a paper cut out with a texture and no shading. I've wanted to try that for awhile actually for a little project of mine and I thought this was the perfect chance to do it. Again I chose a very time consuming approach, drawing a lot of tiny branches which really slowed me down while colouring them in.

What I had to do next was apply the texture. I found several silver ones with patterns which I thought would work for me. But as many textures found on the web, these weren't tiled. I had to spend some time tweaking them and making them fit my tree.

The last part was adding the flowers. At this point, I ran out of time. The initial plan was to draw a big flower and turn it into a brush and use it on the tree, but since I didn't have time for that, I just experimented with preset brushes that I already had. 

Even though I ran out of time, I said to myself that I WILL finish this tree assignment at some point. So a couple of weeks later, I revisited it for a third try. With this one I decided to go back to my initial sketch I made for my 3D model and make a painting out of it. And that's what I got in the end.