Getty Garden, Reimagined

I'm newly in love with the following items:

1.  Molding Paste.  I'm not an acrylic artist, so adding texture is new to me.  In order to capture the sculpturalness of rebar in the Robert Irwin Getty Garden bougainvillea "trees," I basically took this thing the consistency of frosting and frosted the panel using a special tool.

2.  Pigment.  Some say it's toxic to breathe.  The Italian guy I bought it from in Venice assured me I could just add water and it would magically function like totally safe paint.  I add acrylic gel medium because I have zero faith that that is true.  And I am very careful with it!  I used a burnt red, light yellow, and dark green to capture the colors/light of my source photo, and I really love how those colors mixed.

3.  Artisanal Papers.  Blick (formerly Utrecht), the art store, sells these packets of artisanal paper scraps for about $3 a pop, and I pick one up almost every time I go.  For this piece, I cut out leaves from one type of paper, and mulberry paper dogs to capture the bokkeh.  How did I make those perfect circles with limited resources in my Airbnb?  A wine cork, of course!

Can you see how I got the final piece out of this source photo?