Mixed Media Summer Circle Tree Art

Mixed media style art allows you to take what you love from a variety of media like paint, markers, papers, and even digital designs, and combine them to create gorgeous, experimental art. 

With this art, I designed a tree in Illustrator based on circle die templates I have. I wanted to use simple shapes to let the colored, patterned papers stand out. I wanted to cut the branches from wood to add texture and also because it's a tree! I also want the wood grain from the panel I'm working on to stand out so the spirit of nature in the piece is vibrant. I have other die templates of flowers, leafy stems, swirls, and other shapes I want to experiment with as well to make this piece shine.  

Let's get started!

Materials

• 6x12" cradled 7/8" thick unprimed wood panel

• 1/8" thick wood panel that's at least 5" wide and 11" tall

• Paint in bright green, lime, pastel teal, and turquoise (I just buy sample sized interior house paint from Home Depot). You may want additional paint colors for extra details and embellishments, as well.

• Card stock patterned papers (65 lb or heavier) for the tree circles

• A variety of colorful patterned papers for the accents

• Wood stain (optional)

• Mod Podge for paper and Aleene's Tacky Glue for wood and cardboard

• Clear topcoat (one that sprays on will be best)

• Embellishments like gems, rocks, cardboard cutouts of birds or butterflies, etc.

Tools

• Adobe Illustrator or other drawing program if creating your own design (my designs will be provided for download)

• Laser cutter or scroll saw

• Paint brushes (1" or 2" wide flat one for making big, broad strokes and a smaller ones for glue and smaller details)

• Die cutting machine, scissors, or cutting machine like a Cricut or ScanNCut

• Dies in various shapes (if using die cutter) to create circles and add floral elements, butterflies, or additional embellishments

• Rotary tool to round edges of branches (optional)

• Fine grit sandpaper (flexible is better)

• Cloth to add wood stain (if using)

Ideas and basic shapes

Because this is a summer scene, I want happy swirls, gentle breeze, popping colors, and brightness. I need to consider the size of my wood panel, the die shapes and sizes I will be using, and any extras I will add from my stash of embellishments. 

A summer tree will be full of leaves, so my circles will need to have plenty of room. But I'll also need room to add flowers, birds, butterflies, and whatever else I want to be flitting around in the grass and sky. That's a tall order for a narrow wood panel that's twice as tall as it is wide.

The first step is to draw a rectangle 6" wide by 12" tall in Illustrator. I sketched out an idea on paper of a skinny but fluffy tree to get a feel for how it might look. 

Then I measured all my circle dies to see what sizes I'm working with. I drew circles in Illustrator of all the sizes I have to form my tree shape based on the sketch. I only want to use one of the big ones to draw the eye into the piece. This one will probably be the brightest color (most likely a warm color to attract attention). Then I play around with the other size circles to balance out the tree. Right now I'm working in shades of gray to just get the shape formed so I can focus on composition.

Composing the tree

As far as composition goes, I always go to the tried and true Rule of Thirds. With this rule, you divide your canvas into threes vertically and horizontally. You never want to center your focal point on your canvas because that's boring. You want to focal point to land where the lines intersect and then have the rest of the elements of your art follow along those lines to lead the viewers' eyes around the piece and back to the focal point. We'll use the branches coming from the tree trunk as the lines that lead the eyes around the piece, as well as some well placed smaller circles that are bright. 

For this piece, the focal point will be the large warm colored circle. We don't have to center it at the cross of the lines, but just have it near them. We also want to make sure the tree looks as natural as possible. It's like that rule in stories and movies where you can help people suspend their disbelief by using a little bit of realism. Yes, circle trees don't exist, but the shape needs to be somewhat familiar for them to accept the art. 

After I get the circles into a pleasing shape, I draw the trunk and branches. I don't want the trunk to just go straight up and have branches sprout out from the middle. I want it to have character. I also want it to come close to touching all the circles because I need the branches to lead the eye around the piece. I use the paint brush tool in Illustrator to start drawing shapes that I can bend and mold later. I created a curl off on the artboard to add to the ends of the branches when I'm done. I start from the bottom and add branches and splits as I go. When I like the general shape, I add the curls, bumps, and width to the lower parts of the branches. Then I merge it all together into one shape that I can cut later.

Embellishments

Now that I'm happy with my tree, I measure my other dies for flowers, stems, swirls (for the breeze in the sky), and some cardboard cutout butterflies I have. I'll just draw simple shapes to place around the design in Illustrator to help me see how it will all work when I'm ready to create the actual art.

I do this step to help me line up my circles and tree trunk so I can be sure everything fits, especially since I'm working with a narrow panel. I used to print out the design and lay it beside me while I worked, but sometimes I still managed to put things in wrong places, and ended up with pieces coming too close or going over the edges. If you want to just wing it and go with instinct when gluing on your design, skip this step and move on to painting the background.

In order to give myself a little wiggle room, in Illustrator I select all the parts of my tree design (I leave the embellishments like the wind swirls and flowers out of this step), then I go to Object > Path > Offset Path... > and set the offset distance to -0.02. I do this so the engraving gets covered up completely when the whole piece is done. 

You can just leave it as is at this point and engrave the complete shapes of all the background circles, but I find this confusing. Plus, engraving all those extra lines takes longer. So, I go through and use the Minus Front tool in Illustrator to eliminate the sections of the background circles that won't show.

Then I delete all the other elements and save the file as an SVG that my laser cutter will recognize. This file is included below.

I place my wood panel on my laser engraver, make sure the design is in the correct place on the board, then I hit engrave. I want it to be a little deeper since I will be painting over it in the next step, so I increase the power slightly.

Mixing the paint

I wanted the wood grain to show through the background paint because it gives the whole piece that nature vibe. I do that by dabbing some of the paint into the bowls in my palette and adding a little water so the paint soaks into the wood rather than sits on top. I don't really have a formula I stick to for this but just go with instinct. I don't want the paint to be drippy wet because the color won't be as vibrant. So, I use some spare wood I have and test the watered down paint until I get the desired effect. I start with a few drips of water added to the paint, test, and repeat.

When I get the consistency I am looking for, I add the other watered down paint colors I'm going to use into the palette because I need them all to be ready right away. We're blending the paint up as we go to get a gradient effect, so it all needs to be wet as we paint. House paint is acrylic paint and therefore dries pretty quickly. To combat this, we need to work fast. However, working fast is best to get the paint to blend well, so it all works out. 

Swish the paint on

I start at the bottom with the bright green. Make sure to paint the side edges of the panel too. Swipe the paint brush back and forth sideways. When you've painted about a quarter of the way up from the bottom, dip your brush directly into the lime green and keep moving back and forth in the same motion up a little further. Remember to continue to paint the side edges, as well. 

When you are little less than half way up the board, switch to the light teal. I only added a thin strip of the teal before I move to the turquoise for the sky. We want the sky to dominate. We will go back into the sky later and add more of the light teal to give an appearance of wispy clouds. 

Once the turquoise covers the rest of the top of the panel, I switch brushes to a smaller, lighter weight, kinda wispy brush, wet it a little and squeeze any excess water away, then dip the tip of it into the light teal. Then I swish it lightly across the sky. If I feel like it's too much teal, I grab my other paint brush with the turquoise paint still on it and blend the sky some more.

Once I'm happy, I set it aside to dry while I work to choose papers and cut them and the tree trunk. The engraved design underneath will be easier to see once the paint is dry.

Before I even get started, I want to share something I learned a long time ago about decoupage. I've created designs like this one using thinner papers, but with these really large circles I'm using, I needed something sturdier because the thinner paper wrinkles, curls up, and gets hard to work with when the pieces are big. For the smaller elements like the wind swirls and flowers, however, I will be using the thinner papers I have. I have so many of them in fantastic colors, so they are perfect.

I'm going for a summer feel with this piece, so I want to use vibrant and warm colors. The background is in cool colors, so the warm colors will really stand out well. 

To help me decide, I go back into my Illustrator design and choose colors for the circles there. I can rearrange the colors as needed there without having cut any paper first. The most important thing to remember is making my biggest circle the one that really pops. A bright pink or peach would be great for that piece. I want it to be the first thing that draws the eye since it's my focal point. Orange and red are associated with fall, so I'm going to stay away from them for the tree circles. My final colored design is available as a PDF below.

I check my card stock stash to be sure I have the color I want for the big circle before choosing the rest of the colors. I find a great piece that looks like a watercolor paint splash in the color I want. Perfect! Then I choose the other colors for the rest of the circles that will complement the main color. Then I go and find papers in those colors. I choose a couple different options for some of the background circles since I don't have the exact color I picked in Illustrator. Since they're smaller circles, I will cut a few from both papers and see how they look on the board before I commit. 

This is also a good time to decide on the colors for the accent pieces like the flowers and butterfly. Because my butterfly will be a cardboard cutout, I'm simply going to paint that later. But the flowers will be die cut pieces, so I choose papers that accent but don't overpower the tree colors. Because these are meant to represent wildflowers, I'm going to do a variety of colors. 

The flower stems I want to be a light, faded green so they stand out from the bright green and lime paint in the background. I choose a variety of papers after laying them against the background. I'll cut a bunch of stems and try them all out later. Whatever I don't use, I can save for other projects.

And I have an off-white swirly patterned paper I will use for the wind swirls. It's almost too perfect!

I used die templates, but you could also use the SVG file below to cut your circles on a Cricut or other cutting machine. I've also included some basic stems, flowers, swirls, and a butterfly for you to embellish with. You could also just draw the circles and other shapes on the back of your card stock and cut them out with scissors. I'm including a PDF of the shapes below for you to print if you need to.

After cutting the circles plus the extras, I really didn't like that top circle being the faded mauve color I had chosen. It seemed like too much. So I cut two of the smaller sized circles out of a greenish blue and tried those. I liked the bigger of the two. I put the butterfly cutout next to it and really liked it, so I kept that. This is why it's important to try a couple different things before gluing anything down. Sometimes other colors or sizes work better when you see them in front of you. 

With the flowers and stems, I'm not entirely sure at this point how many I'll want to add after I glue on the tree pieces, so I just stack a few papers together and cut them all out at once. I also flipped the papers over to get some of the stems facing the other direction. Whatever I don't use I can save for later.

I cut the wind swirls from the off-white paper. I don't know where or how I'm going to place them at this point, so I just cut a bunch.

And because I love texture, I added embossed bumps to my circle papers using my die cutter's embossing pad and a piece of cardboard I had with holes cut into it. Place the right side of the card stock facing down when using this technique, so the bumps are raised instead of indented.

The tree trunk I created is on the SVG and PDF files below. I cut that out of the 1/8" thick wood on my laser cutter. If you have a scroll saw, you can print the trunk out and use it as a pattern to cut the wood that way. 

If you don't want to mess with the wood for the trunk, you can cut it out of card stock using a cutting machine or scissors. 

While the laser cutter is doing it's job, I move on to gluing the flat paper items on the panel.

Because the wind is a background element, I want to glue those swirls on before I place the tree. I will want some of them popping out from behind the tree circles, after all.

Because I engraved the shape of the tree, I can see where it will land in order to place my wind swirls for maximum effect. I don't want to go more than a third down the panel since we start seeing grass at that point, so I keep my wind swirls up high. 

I want to try out a variety of locations and directions before I glue anything down. I place them on the panel and get them where I want them. I put some of the top tree circles on top of them to see how they'll look.

Then I pick up one at a time and use a smaller flat paint brush to brush Mod Podge on the backs before placing them back on the panel permanently. Because these are thin, I have to be very careful not to rip the paper while peeling them off my glued fingers and placing them back. I use the brush to help hold them down onto the board while peeling them off my finger. Once I have them back on the panel, I brush over the tops of them as well.

I keep a damp washcloth nearby to wipe my fingers off so I don't get glue everywhere.

NOTE: You'll notice after the Mod Podge dries that there's a sheen in the area where you painted it on top. It really shows up when you look at it from different angles in the light. Don't worry about this for now. When we are done gluing down all the flat papers, we'll paint a slightly watered down layer of Mod Podge over the whole surface to protect it and that will cover up all these shiny areas by making it one big shiny area.

Using the design I created in Illustrator as my guide, I work from back to front. 

I paint a little bit of Mod Podge onto the back of a circle spreading it close to the edge. Then I use my finger to spread it all the way to the edge and make sure it's spread evenly across the whole space. Use glue sparingly to prevent warping and speed drying time. 

Then I glue each circle on using the engraved design as my guide for placement. I place one edge down and smooth it onto the wood, spreading my fingers up and out to make sure it lays flat on the surface and has no trapped bubbles. By the time I get all the circles in the back placed, the first couple will be dry, and I can go ahead and start on the next layer of circles.

After the tree circles are good and dry, I will start placing the paper flower stems and flowers in a variety of locations to see where they might look best. I can use the engraving of the bottom of the tree trunk to see where I can put things. It might look good to have one poking its head out from behind the tree.

I only approximated the shapes of these embellishments in Illustrator, so I want to see the final composition with the actual shapes I'm working with.

I have a lot of flowers and stems to work with, but I don't want to overpower the bottom of the art with them because I still want that big circle on the tree to be the focal point. I'll place a few flowers with a few stems and try some flowers with several stems to see what works. Most of the stems are really big, so I use a craft knife to trim them to fit the space better.

Since I have a lot of tiny flowers, I think it will look cool to have them as the centers of the bigger ones. Plus, I get to mix colors which you see in a lot of wildflowers. I also put a few flowers just sitting in the grass.

Once I'm happy with their placement, I take a picture that I print out and keep next to my work surface to refer to as I'm gluing the pieces down. I begin gluing the flower stems like I did the wind swirls earlier. I start with the stems that don't have flowers attached and the flowers just sitting in the grass since they are single-layer elements. Then for the layered elements, I move the flowers off the stems they go to, glue their stems down, and place the flowers on top after giving the stems a fresh coat of glue on top. Then I glue down the smaller, center flowers and coat the whole set with another layer of Mod Podge. Once I'm done, I let the glue dry for about 20 minutes before I start step 11.

If you want to use a rotary tool to grind away the top edges at an angle to round them off, do that now. Very carefully run it along the edges because it is very powerful and this trunk is delicate. For tight corners, I have glued a flexible piece of fine grit sandpaper to a round skewer and used the point of the skewer to get into the little crevices and curved areas. 

I'm not going to round the edges because I like the burnt sides that the laser cutter creates and want to leave those dark. Sanding the edges will remove that. However, because I haven't set up my air assist yet on my laser cutter, there are some dark areas on the top that I need to gently sand away before staining it. I use my fine grit flexible sand paper and rub with the grain in one direction to remove that. Then I wipe the surface with a towel to clean it before staining it.

For the stain, I used Minwax PolyShades in Espresso because it has the polyurethane added and is one less step for me to worry about. Instead of brushing it on with a paint brush, I put on nitrile gloves, dip a cloth into the stain after stirring it really well, then just rub the stain onto the surface. After covering the whole surface, I wipe the trunk down with a dry section of the cloth. I've found this cuts down on drying time (it also helps that I live in a dry climate). 

The instructions say to wait at least 6 hours for it to be dry, but it will be dry to the touch much faster allowing me to work with it before I add a final clear coat to the surface.

To give all the paper a protective coat and eliminate any weird shiny parts where the Mod Podge has already been painted, I'm going to coat the whole surface in a layer of Mod Podge. 

I use a paint cup and add a couple dollops of Mod Podge to it. Then just as I thinned the paint for the background, I will add drops of water to the Mod Podge to thin it and make it easier to paint. I don't want it to be too watery or it will ruin the paper. But too thick makes it hard to work with for a large area like this.

I will keep another cup of water nearby in case I need to thin it after I've painted it onto the surface.

When I get a good consistency, I use my big brush that I used to paint the background and paint it over the surface. I always start the brush on a wood area to keep from globbing too much glue onto the paper pieces. If it seems too thick in areas, I will dip my brush slightly into the water cup, press out excess water, and then run the brush over the thick areas.

Be careful not to brush over any papered areas too much or it will wear those areas out. I brushed a little too aggressively along the sides of the tree circles on the left and wore the paper thinner there. But it still has character, so I'm going to leave it. If I hadn't liked it, I would have placed some smaller paper circles over those spots to cover them up. That's the great thing about mixed media is you can just improvise when things don't go exactly as planned!

I'll let it dry at least 20 minutes before gluing on the tree trunk and butterfly.

I already have an idea of where I might like the butterfly because I included it in my design in Illustrator, but I want to see it on the real piece first before I make it permanent.

I also want to decide if the earlier color I planned for the butterfly is the absolute best. I want it to be bright, but will the color I chose in Illustrator work well where the butterfly is placed (near the other circles it's next to)? 

Once that's decided, I paint the butterfly. I use a smaller brush so gobs of paint don't get stuck in the little open spaces. I paint the sides and even the bottom a little bit to make sure none of the brown shows.

Once that's dry, I use Tacky Glue to secure it to the board. Tacky Glue works really well and fast. 

I put small dots of glue on the larger sections of the back of the butterfly and use my finger to spread it over the whole surface. I don't want it to be too globby around the outside edges, but if glue gets inside the inside cutout parts, that's fine because it won't show when the butterfly is glued down.

Then I press the butterfly into place, hold it down for about 20 seconds making sure not to shift it around, and let go. 

If glue comes out of the outside edges, use a needle or straight pin to clean up.

When the trunk is dry to the touch, I use Tacky Glue to affix it to the board. 

I squeeze dots and lines of glue down the middles of the trunk and branches and then spread it to the edges with my finger. I make sure to spread it on the curly parts and make sure the back of every surface of the wood is covered. You don't want the glue to be too thick though because you don't want it to push outside of the edges when you place it down. 

Then I line it up using the engraved lines as my guide and place it flat down. I press firmly but make sure not to push too hard so it won't slip. Count to 20 and let go. Clean up with a needle or straight pin if any glue comes out of the side.

If you are adding more paper, wood, or cardboard embellishments, you can glue those down where you like before adding the final top coat. However, If you are gluing down gems, plastic, metal, or resin decorations, you will want to place them last after you've sprayed the clear top coat on. The reason is the top coat, even a high gloss one, will dull the surface of gems, plastic, resin, and metal. Those items become tacky and seem to collect every speck of dust and fingerprint in your home if you try spraying them with the top coat. 

So, after you've placed all your paper, cardboard, and wood embellishments, spray a clear top coat over the surface in a well ventilated area or outside if it's not windy. Keep the spray can about 8-10" from the surface, and use a sweeping back and forth motion to coat the art evenly. 

Let it dry at least an hour before gluing on gems or other embellishments. I had some clear, plastic half-ball things I found in the floral department at Michaels that I glued to the centers of the flowers. I used a glue that dries clear so you can see the color beneath them.

After everything is dry, you're ready to show off your hard work! I have a small display easel that I rest my art on, but you could also find triangle hangers and wire to attach to the back, or just stand it up on a shelf.