The Sentinel acrylic landscape

                                                                    The Sentinel
                                                                       16"x10"
                                                                       Acrylic

Over all these years we have gone to the mountains we have always taken pictures.  So we have documents the wooly adelgid's demise to the hemlocks.  Now they are telling us there is a new one, Asian Longhorned beetle that will probably decimate 20 more species of trees, no solution once it takes root.  This particular hemlock tree sits with a sister (this one is still among the living) on an overlook on the Blueridge Parkway.  Each year we check it's progress and think it won't make another season as life is tough at elevation.  But yet it still stands, a testament to a plant's stubbornness.  

I wanted to jazz up the picture by trying yet another night sky so added it in and made this another silhouette picture in the celestial skies series.   I guess there are a few more in my future as I still am not comfortable putting these together.

I tried several techniques for the stars from toothbrush, to knocking one brush against another, to finally just dabbing in with a smaller brush.  Let me tell you, the paint really flies in the first two techniques and of course I used phthalo blue to you know it gets everywhere.  I swear that color has a life of it's own.  I know they look excessive, but when we get at elevation on the dark mountain top you really do see so many more stars than we are accustomed to seeing living in the city.

Thanks much for stopping by and taking a look.