This particular work spanned a number of years.
At the start
Back in 2013, I had just moved into my own place. A friend had come to my place and shown me a project she did with kids, using toilet roll tubes, masking tape, newspaper and glue to make a tree. We had fun making it, though the end result was comically bad. |
| Just the trunk and roots. |
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| A branch or two... |
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| More branches! |
I dressed it up at Christmas...
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| Some golden balls and a star. |
...and at Halloween. It was great.
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| A hanged man! |
Somehow, three years later, I lost my job. Thoughts raged in my head, doubts about my professional credentials and my ability to survive in Singapore's workforce, even though logically, I had lost my job in what amounted to a business closure that had very little to do with my competence at all. Still, what with having a huge amount of time on my hands in between applying for jobs and keeping my coding skills sharp, I needed to not be thinking negative and counter-productive thoughts. Thus, I threw myself into adding more features to the tree.
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| Even more branches! |
I packed it more densely - previously it had just been about stuffing newspaper confetti into toilet roll tubes and then pouring glue in and letting it dry, then wrapping it up in layers of tape. Now, I actually added wire into the mix to shape things. For every day I remained unemployed, I added one more branch. Those branches sprouted smaller branches, which in turn sprouted some more.
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| Looking good! |
Soon it was growing at a steady rate. Little branches popped up. Now it was starting to resemble a bonsai. I began adding layers of glue and newspaper to the base. No more shoddy work with crushed newspaper. The roots, in particular, were looking increasingly solid.
Then I got employed, and no longer had time to continue building on the tree. I was earning what amounted to serious money, for me. And I needed to focus.
For years, my creation was left there languishing in my living room, looking like some tree-shaped Frankenstein's monster.
Five years later
In 2018, I got married. COVID-19 happened a year later, along with a little more upheaval in my employment situation. The wife was trapped in China, under pandemic lockdowns. I started looking at the tree again, critically. Though, this time, around Christmas, I was looking at the base I had created for it, out of large toilet roll tubes. What if the tree roots rested on something rather than floating on air?What if I filled these toilet roll tubes with papier-mache?
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| Another Christmas. |
I bit the bullet, and embarked on the task. I was determined to finish it, come hell or high water, though the entire thing turned out heavier than I had expected. I had to divide the base into three pieces, and work on them separately. While I was close to finishing the first piece, my wife returned.
In the time that she was back, she was less than impressed with what I was doing. Admittedly, it was a work in progress and did not look in the least impressive. Just before she left for China again, she remarked that we were about to move house in another year, and when we did, we should abandon all the ugly and useless things I had accumulated in my place over the years... all the while looking meaningfully at my tree.
That did it. In that moment, I resolved to step up my efforts to make the tree presentable.
The Foundation
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| Three large slabs. |
By that time, I had finished filling in the toilet roll tubes, and now had three great slabs of dry papier-mache. I needed a way to assemble these easily, and disassemble them for easy packing. That was how I came up with the idea below, pins made from pointed wooden sticks and papier-mache.
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| The pins. |
The above came about when I was idly molding a piece of damp papier-mache in my fingers, and as it dried, it looked like a slab of granite. And that gave me the idea of making pins that looked like slabs of stone. But it also gave me a further idea. What if I glued several of these pieces to the sides of the slabs, to simulate a rough-hewn stone wall?
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| Making a wall. |
I started making papier-mache bricks. Lots of them. Big, small, roughly rectangular, some not so much. At some point, I had a pile of them. And when I started putting them together for the "wall", I came to realize that it was still not enough. I would have to up my production.
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| Little papier-mache bricks. |
The wall was fun, by the way. It was like putting together a jigsaw. It took a month or so, but now I had three great papier-mache blocks, each with their own wall, and joinable to each other via the pins.
Now I had another problem - how to make the joins seem more seamless?
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| A pointed stick fence... |
I came up with the idea of a fence made from pointed sticks. Each of these sections of fence were glued and tied together with yarn. This made it look organic and rustic... but unfortunately also made them crooked and warped.
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| ...now with points removed. |
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| Repeating the fence sections. |
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| Binding with thread. |
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| Slipping the fence sections in. |
I added little blockade sections to the bases so that the fences could slot nicely into them. I also extended the pins to have little slots where the ends of each fence section could slide in. Talk about engineering!
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| The completed fence. |
And tada... a fence.
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| A winch! |
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| Bases for the winch. |
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| Fitting in nicely... |
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| Well walls. |
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| Combining the walls and winch. |
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| Add a roof... |
With the leftover papier-mache bricks, I made a well. I added a roof and a winch, which could actually turn!
Final touches
And now it was time to turn my attention to the tree itself. It had lasted so many years, and now I found that a lot of air pockets existed, just by doing a press test at different locations - trunk, roots, branches. I began cutting it open, and filling in the gaps with papier-mache. The process was akin to playing the whack-a-mole game. Every time I thought I'd gotten them all, I found another patch. |
| Patching the holes. |
A week passed, and another. But finally, I covered them all. And then I started covering the ugly newspaper skin with a thin layer of papier-mache. This had the texture of what approximated tree bark. And while I was at it, I added numerous little twigs to the various branches to round out the shape of the entire tree.
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| Adding a bark covering. |
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| Almost done. |
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| Adding tiny branches from leftover pointed sticks. |
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| In all its unpainted glory. |
Once it was dry, it was time to paint. I gave it two coats of acrylic. The first was a matt black which was meant to cover every nook and cranny. The second coat was a glossy brown finish to deliberately make the coloring look uneven in spots.
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| Starting from the roots. |
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| Up to the branches. |
On the final few days of last year, I began the process of moving house. One of the first things I moved was this tree. I took apart the fence, the pins, and the foundation slabs. And then I got a cabbie friend to do me the favor of transporting these to my new place, where I proceeded to reassemble it right in front of him.
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| Disassembled. |
When my wife came home and saw the final result, she was pretty impressed. She was definitely no longer calling it "ugly and useless".
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| My beautiful tree, in my beautiful new home. |
The tree was placed outside my front door in a prominent spot. My new neighbors came by, took pictures and marvelled. My parents dropped by during the Lunar New Year, and voiced their approval. If you don't have Asian parents, you have no clue how huge a deal that was.
Conclusion
That was a pretty Herculean effort on my part. This was not a software project. There were no do-overs if I screwed anything up badly.However, in other aspects, it was like a software project. In the sense that everything was done iteratively. Every feature was broken down into separate tasks, with subsequent features planned on top of completed features. As of now, this tree is the finest work that these hands have produced.
Branching out,
T___T
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