Tree art and inspiration

Found a lot of interesting and inspiring examples of Tree art and the human form as I've been researching and thought I should include some examples as a type of mood blog for the project. Been looking into so many different ways trees are used visually in sculpture, photography, ritual and as art pieces. It's helping me decide and push the project in the type of directions concerning the human form and the aura trees have.

It's gave me a better understanding of how trees influence us and how we engage with them and also how important they can be. Trees seem to create such a strong presence and have different auras surrounding them and a lot going on for them to thrive and survive. Their constantly growing and competing for sunlight and rain so they can produce food and nutrients as well as buds. These then can start new life cycles and germinate the female and male buds to create new trees and ensure new growths of the same type of trees. They provide shelter from the sun and home to many animals and insects as well producing endless resources for humans. Especially as tools in the art world since we use paper as usually a starting point and resin and latex also come in forms from trees as well.

Feel positive using the trees and natural materials as a theme and very inspiring about and our relationship with them creatively. 

Development : Collecting photography images and source material

To gather more source materials and some resources spent an evening in Victoria park to take some photographs and see what I could find. Found some interesting bark textures in trees and thought they would be useful as a type of catalogue of what I could work with for further photographs. Started to see shapes and patterns in some of the barks and our perception of faces.

I also took notice of a lot of the different ways the environment had effected the textures of the trees like rot and mold with also animals using the trees to their advantages. Such as homes and places to nest and hide such as insects and spiders. I collected some of the bark from the trees which I'll be experimenting with further in the studio.

Also explored and started to photograph different trees I found had interesting shapes and forms as well as different sizes and from different perspectives. Each tree seemed to have its own different personality and colours which portrayed different moods. Some of them even seemed to form different limbs and parts of the human body and some interesting abstract imagery.

Felt I got a good few different examples of shapes and forms of trees I can edit and play around with later in Photoshop/collages. I also collected a few things such as pine cones and conkers which come from trees and felt their relation with them would be good to use as materials.

With help from Alastair we found a spot that didn't have many people walking by and started to take photographs of my arms. Since this was my starting point of ideas and images of my arms as tree branches or tree like pictures. We also played around with photographs of my legs and also parts of my skin such as my back. We tried out quite abstract shots of my arms and perspective shots making my limbs look part of the environment and different scales.

Felt it made quite strong images for a first try of photographing my limbs and a bold contrast with my skin and the bark of the trees. I would like to take these images further and edit them in Photoshop as well expanding my ideas with them. I will be going into the woods again after planning out some more ideas and being more prepared for another shoot as well experimenting with composition of my limbs/body.

Trying to ease back into filming and documenting my progress for this project so been playing around with simple editing and shots.