Life Via Leaf

This piece was done on a leaf. It's a more nontraditional piece because of that, but I actually did it for an online competition that was labeled for nontraditional art, so it fit perfectly. It depicts the stages of a life being born. The first part is the upper left corner, where the woman and man fall in love, the woman then gets pregnant, the child is born and has new experiences like their first steps, and then the child begins to grow up. The top is meant to be decked out with blank space (which was the only way I could actually do this piece) because it is hectic and emotional, but it all leads up to a goal. That goal is the lower half of the leaf, where a son or daughter is happy and healthy and growing. It's sort of a "gift of life" piece. I had to use silhouettes throughout this piece because the designs had to actually be cut into the leaf, so each piece that I wanted to remain would have to connect somehow to the rest of the leaf. It was a challenge to plan out, but it ran pretty smoothly once I had it prepared. One downside to cutting into a leaf for art's sake is that the leaf dried up the next day. Luckily, I was able to do this all in a single day, but even then it was already trying to roll back in on itself as i worked.

<-----A progress shot of how I used paper to sketch out my figures, then tracing paper to make into guidelines, and then finally i was able to cut into the leaf itself.