I was lucky to find some cage type hearts on a sale. I originally intended to hang this heart on the door of our flat, but when it was finished I dared not put it there.
A closeup of the lady. Her dress looks kind of Victorian but it's hardly historically correct... she was just intended to look pretty and I didn't have any reference books at hand.
As I'm very fond of the bright colors of Autumn, I've long been thinking about doing some kind of Autumn scene. In October 2003, I realized that the curlicues of the wire hearts reminded me of tree branches and decided to get started on my scene. The tree itself is a Woodland Scenics tree frame that I repainted, along with the wire heart. They turned out a little too pale, so I applied a black wash all over to darken them. This also emphasized the structure of the the tree bark.
For the leaves, I painted a piece of tissue paper and then punched out hundreds of leaves that I glued on individually. The garden bench is a photo-etched miniature, and the rake is based on a 1" scale pattern in Dollhouse Miniatures (November 2003).
A Winter heart. The heart is painted white and covered with sparkling model railroad snow (which seems to be a mix of shredded clear plastic and ultra-fine glitter).
Unfortunately, it's hard to take photos as the front part the heart obscures the interior... it looks better in real life! The Christmas tree is based on a brush style tree, and I glued pieces of lycopodium into it. It is decorated with big blue metallic balls, big iridiscent balls and three sizes of silver balls. Click on this picture to open a much larger view in a separate window (file is 371 kB).
