Musicians get into their music. My 12-year-old brother plays the mountain dulcimer, and I know he really gets into what he is playing. While I was making this picture he found some good music for me to listen to and advised me to make her face looking down at her instrument because that is what he does when he is really getting into the song he is playing.
This picture is made of: delphinium, seed, bark, corn silk, aucuba and dill.
What I wanted to get across in this picture was, well, a dog. I wanted to capture the energy of a dog racing toward you with a stick in its mouth, eager for you to thow it again- the life and the excitement of a dog in its element. We had a black and white springer spaniel- Solomon. He loved to play "stick".
This winter I spent hours thinking through, researching and making this picture to be entered into the Philadelphia Flower Show. To my surprise and delight it won third place. The overall theme of the flower show was "Springtime in Paris". I entered the pressed-flower category of a Paris Cafe'. Audry Hepburn movies were helpful for research. Dent de Lion Cafe' was named after the yellow flowers we, in America, call dandelions. For those of you who don't know, I am reading the French novel by Victor Hugo, Les Misereables. Reading it has given me a great intrest in France. Although Victor Hugo's novel is set in 1830's France, I brought many of its characters to a more modern day scene, except for the family at the bottom, which is my family. Below shows who's who.
Jean Valjean is the main character in Les Miserables. He adopts Cosette, who loves Marius. The black tabletops in this picture are made from black hollyhocks with corn husks underneath them to give them a more interesting texture.
Inspector Javert's world revolves around the law. He chases Jean Valean (who is a parole violator) throughout the book. Javert took two tries. The first Javert was too big.
Marius is not a waiter in the book but it seemed like a good thing for him to be in this picture. His clothes (in the picture, not in the book) are made out of banana peel and his apron is black hollyhock.
Theses revolutionaries are plotting a better world. They all end up dying on a barricade. 
OK, these two characters are actually extremely poor and would not have clothes like this. But I wanted to have lots bright colors in this picture hence, the fancy clothes. The Thenardiers are criminals. Their daughter Eponine is in love with Marius which is just too bad because he loves "someone else".
And this is my family. Everthing in this picture is natural. Philadelphia rules state no color enhancment. Here is a list of the plant material in this picture: creeping raspberry, birch bark, aucuba, bloody dock, dandelion, thyme, butterfly bush, ferns, statice, cornflower, rose, lettace, black hollyhock, corn husk, gray poplar, money plant, variouse fall leaves, black-eyed-Susan, banana peel, onion membranes, cockscomb, Japaneses maple, corn silk and some sort of a dead iris type foliage.
TO SEE THE OTHER PRESSED FLOWER PICTURES THAT WERE ENTERED, CLICK HERE. THERE WERE SEVERAL DIFFERENT PRESSED FLOWER CATEGORIES IN THIS SHOW SO MAKE SURE TO SCROLL DOWN TO SEE THEM ALL.
Winning third was a great 16th birthday present. I also got to go to the Les Miserables musical with my grandma, my dad and my brother.
