Family Tree Artwork

I am so proud of this one but, I can't lie, it wasn't my idea in the first place. I saw this project on one of the many blogs I peruse and was totally inspired to do my own. Of course, I had to tweak it a little to make it my own.
First I did a little sketching. I initially drew trees similar to the one in the original project but I then decided they weren't really my style. I thought I'd try to go more realistic but then realized, hey, I'm not that good a drawer. So I googled "picture of tree" just to see what came up. There were two that I really liked: The Plain Tree by Henri Matisse and The Tree of Life by Tim Parish. I played around and sketched both of them and ended up going with the Parish inspired one, mainly because it was easier and also because it gave a lot of room for writing family names.
I got two canvases, sketched my tree on, painted them brown -- I purposely left it streaky because I thought it looked cool and that way I could also still faintly see my sketch -- and then used black paint and a steady hand to paint in the tree. I won't lie, it took a loooooong time to do the curly, tapering branches. I had to buy a new, fine tipped brush because my old one wasn't holding a fine enough tip. I then cut out leaves from some green handmade paper and mod-podged them around the tree. Use a paint pen to fill in the names of the family, slap another couple layers of mod-podge on to seal the whole thing and, ta-da! My own art to hang in our bedroom! Love it to bits and pieces.I hung them over our bed which took several tries because I am HORRIBLE at hanging things. It always comes out crooked or uneven or too high or too low. My plan is to paint a coordinating green "frame" on the wall around it which I think will really make it pop. Mr. Cakes doesn't understand painting a frame (he said he's never heard of people doing that) to which I reply, "Please leave the decorating to me".