Quote:
|
CONTEST SUMMARY: This contest challenges you, the bonsai artist, to obtain and style the best tree you can with a $20 material budget.
|
These were the words used for the contest summary. I think they were clear, concise, and to the point. Let's review some of the finer points of styling bonsai from a nursery container.
These points will be based on the ability of me having a very long growing season, and therefore having huge blocks of stock in the nursery's as soon as the last weekend of Feb. If you have a short growing season or nurserys have poor choices to choose from, so be it.
The Hunt The idea was to pick the best stock available for your 20.00 bucks.
How many reviewed all the stock in the nursery of the given plant you chose?
How many knew what they were going to do with the plant when they took it from the purchase point?
Did you utilize all the potential that you saw at the nursery?
Did you put the plant on the table at home and turn it about 50 times trying to find a front or something to style from?
If you answered any two of these yes, you were doomed from the start. The whole idea was to put forth all the things you have learned from the forum and put those ideas in motion in picking out the stock.
Did you choose something that had some great trunk line or branching? Did it have gobs of foliage to help in picking out the branches that would maximize the material?
The Design Being this was contest, I was surprised at the diversity of the stock.
Some chose deciduous and some chose conifers. I would think to maximize the judges decision, there would have been much more utilization of dead wood, jins and shari's. I felt the trees would be shown in much more complex styles to help sway the judging in their direction. I did use some drastic techniques on the tree that I styled and payed the price for it with some dead branches above the shari. But... I needed only one photo to post for the contest and that is what I went for. The tree has responded well to the loss and I have new branches that will take their place, and the tree may even look better!
I was totaly amazed at the almost complete lack of the use of wire. Some of the designs were very interesting, yet somehow missed with the forum voting due in part to the untidy look of the foliage. The branches were styled in the correct way, but the foliage is just sort of hanging down all over the place and no order was introduced to make it look stylized.
I wonder if all those that did not use wire might actually wire the tree and repost them in this thread. I for one would like to see them more complete and see where they might have been in the outcome.
In fact in might be nice to repost all the trees that were in the contest, just to see where they are now.
My Opinion ..for what thats worth, is that in general the contest went well. I would have liked to had more enter, and more votes. Though.. we got the job done.
My opinion goes out like this.. The winner Treebeard. This was an excellent choice. I had told Treebeard that he had the best tree very early on, and that if I were voting I would have picked his too. One thing I missed though. In the smaller pic that he entered I did not see the tiny branch along the right side of the trunk and then bent out sharply to hide a hole in the canopy. When he posted the later, larger pic it showed huge. This may be a fault, I don't know, but I think it detracts from the design. I have seen this done on many trees, but it is usually done with a branch from the back and is not noticable from the front. If he decides to keep this plant, that may have to be repaired if it lives, it looks bent very hard.
The tree with the most potential in the long haul, was the boxwood of David Chauvin. The tree has great proportions and will fill out with foliage and become a great tree in about 5 years. Just too slow for a 90 day styling contest. We all know what an artist David is, and the small vote count does not do his work justice.
OMC's tree has great potential for the long haul too. The trunk has the good twists and turns that will add interest to the plant years from now. I just think it was pruned back a little hard for the contest and should have used some of the great foliage and been detailed wired for looks. I know that those branches were longer then that and could have added some dimension and proportion to the tree. As it was it was just too narrow.
I thought Jay's entry was imaginative. I liked the overall impression he was trying to make, and I think he would have nailed that impression with some detail wiring! Care to give it a try Jay?
Overall I saw some plants that were large and full of foliage, and when done with the pruning they were takin back to a few small remnents of branching and nothing to work with. Less is more, but in some cases less is not enough! More care and thought has to be taken before the first cuts are made. The tree should be sketched on paper, and the branches to be removed should be marked with tape, and then blocked out with a sheet of paper.
Sketching a plant on paper can be the single most important thing you do in tree design.
I would like to hear some other comments about how the trees were done.