This competition ran in February/March 2006 and was run by Andadas. We also owe a word of thanks to Eazy-O for writing up this summary from the information posted on the forum.
I want a piece based on vegetation. It must have some sort of plant life as the prominent feature. Think big for this one. There are no limits to how or with what you make your plant life just make alot of it. Things you could make are a forest of trees, crops, hedge rows, a REALLY overgrown ruin, and anything else your imagination can come up with. Simply grassing a base or a grass field wont cut it.
The largest flower in the world is the Raflesia - it grows in South East Asia and lives parasitically within a jungle vine. Every few years it flowers: its party trick is too look and smell like rotting meat so as to attract flies to it so that it can pollinate. What if one got really out of hand?
The basic structure is a washer inside a deodorant bottle top. There are 8 stamens/ tentacles made out of really thick garden wire and a five-petalled flower. I've tried to give the tentacles thorns and have used a textured paint to do it. When stuck on the paint stayed up in a pseudo thorny fashion although a few days later it has subsided looking more like bumps. Leaves have been cut out using a craft stamper. The skeletons are GW figures and they already look suitably twisted. I've cut a base out of MDF and then piled scraps of foamcore, balsa wood, three wooden door knobs, etc and then covered the surface with interior mastic. There are some slate pebbles shoved in to create outcrops. I then covered it in sharp sand.
I've put down about six thin layers of maroon, red, and flesh to varying degrees (the real life plant was supposed to look like rotting flesh) and I think it looks pretty flower like. The textured paint blobs worked well - I like the effect and think it replicates the source quite well. I've experimented with dried herbs as leaf mould for the first time and like how it came out. The pool idea didn't work as the varnish was absorbed into the base or moved through capilliary action. The thorns/ stamens took three layers of progrssively lighter green - that was pretty straightforward to do, but the fine detail was a pain as I was trying not to touch anything as I was painting - it wasn't the most stable base - interesting though.
The tower is made from the guts of four Thermostatic Radiator Valves, the coggy bits are integral to the plastic moulding, the part of the valve which goes "tick tick tick" as you turn it round. The larger circular piece was taken from a shower control. The mushrooms and the Splatter Fungus were made from expandy foam. The Splatter fungus was made by squirting the can upside down, so that the foam "spits" out rather than coming in a steady stream. All the foam pieces were extruded onto a concrete floor which I had emptied a bucket of water over. This prevents them sticking to the floor. The small green mushrooms are Milliput.
I've used embossed wallpaper for the under-undergrowth. The tree trunks were made by inserting some pipe cleaners into the open end of a silicone caulking gun, and squeezing them out again slowly. Then they were left to dry for a couple of days. The flowers are seed beads stuck onto jewelry wire with added bristles from a broom added, and "planted" in holes drilled into the base, with superglue fertiliser.
I could go on but with a project like this I had to draw the line somewhere, otherwise I would never stop! The final additions have been the rocks scattered around the base of the giant mushrooms, and the blue alien pods near the base of the yellow mastic trees. These were made from the heads of poppies dried out and cut from the stalks and painted.
Further pictures of the plants in this piece can be seen in our archives in our article about Alien Plants.
I've always been meaning to make some sort of a floating plant based on a ping-pong ball. Kind of a Spore Mine on steroids (but more benign, perhaps). This competition was a good excuse to give it a go. The raw materials I started with were a ping-pong ball, a computer ribbon cable, a medium sized base and some more cables.
First I mounted the ball on the base with some soft iron wire, then lined the mounting wire on the seam, so that I could later use the seam as a guide for embellishing the plant. Next I cut off one end of the ribbon cable and shredded the individual wires. I left the last half inch or so intact to hold them all together. I attached this to the bottom of the ball with green stuff. Then I used some green stuff and created a ridge along the top. I changed the iron wire so that it pushed out the top, then anchored it with the green stuff. I added some flowery bits from some plastic flowers I purchased from Hobby Lobby. I then added a little texture to the green stuff with a dental pick.
The painting was actually pretty easy. I started with spraying with Dark Angels Green (GW product) spraypaint. I drybrushed tan on the body (snakebite leather) used Goblin Green to paint the veins (vines) on the sides, touched those up with Red Gore, and washed it with orange ink. I like to use washes on top of highlights, since it tends to tie the colors together for a more organic look. I also used Red Gore and yellow on the flowering bits on top. I added the yellow dots along the ridge on top to mask the seam where the greenstuff ended and the pingpong ball started. Red gore was added in patches on the trailing vines (especially at the tips) to provide a little contrast.
I think I proved the point about being able fill a square metre (or did I say yard) of table with trees for 10 quid. I managed to get enough wood for a metre/yard square of bases as offcuts from the local builders merchants for a quid, and after the PVA and paint there isn't really anything else to buy. The canopies are polystyrene packing chips (free) wrapped in tissue (pinched from the kitchen and bathroom) and covered with tea (from used teabags). I used dowel for the trunks but this could just have easily been twigs from the local park.
The stuff on the ground is tea, shavings and sawdust from when I was cutting up the MDF (very fine dust). The dead branches on the ground are selected stalks from a bunch of grapes (dried out in the oven). The green bits are actually bits from Javis (GW type) trees. I used to have them in a plastic tub in my shop and the tub used to end up with crumbs in the bottom that had fallen off. I suppose that's cheating as far as the budget is concerned but hey, I didn't pay for 'em, I just didn't chuck 'em out when I was sweeping up.