Making Palms (and peeking at your paper for the answers)

Well I guess for now my grade is an I for incomplete.

If you can recall, I was doing Party Dolly's Palm Tree Tutorial.  Okay so here we go with my RE-torial (yes, I make up words)

Here is what I started with. Some big fake leaves, scissors, tape and wooden dowels (and my lazy model).

 Then I snipped them like so.

Then instead of hot gluing them to the dowels, I taped the little mini stem to the dowel. Now I can shift the leaves around so they can look at bit more natural. I then wrapped the dowel in blue tape.

But the blue tape didn't have the adhesion I wanted so I switched to papier mache, which I am a big fan of. Really it's the same thing. Paper + glue.

 So here are the supplies for the next leg of this project. Multicolored paints, elmer's glue plus water and strips of construction paper. I used a ruler to hold down the paper while I ripped it so I would get fairly even strips. Then I could create that criss crossing Party Dolly talked about. But that didn't actually work out....

 One coat of papier mache:

Second coat of papier mache. It's so funny, the artist in the picture in that newspaper was waiting tables in the restaurant/lounge where the Hubs was DJing the day before I took this picture. Small town, Atlanta is.

Anyway I did some criss crossing but it didn't turn out as obvious as I would have liked.

 Okay so after that was dry, I painted the stems with a dull brown.  Then I tried my hand at dry brushing. After some palm tree research I decided not to do criss cross, but horizontal stripes like on some palms.  Um, hmm. Yeah that just didn't look right either.

But I was pleased with the look. Really close up you can make out all the green and yellow I put in. Looks like the bark of some OTHER kinda tree. But from afar, looks like dull brown sticks.

So I'm sort of at an impass. I tried painting with sticks like Party Doll but man, that looked terrible. Maybe I dry brushed with the wrong brush? I used the one that looks like a fan.

Anyway I'm thinking of using something else to help me with the pattern. Here are the suggestions from me and the Hubs. Please vote:

1. wrap in doll rubber bands at small intervals and paint over with a lighter gray brown. Maybe dry-sponging or similar.
2. wrap a wide piece of foam core in fishnet (so that the X's are stretched wide), sponge with dark brown paint and stamp tree with it.
3. use a piece of burlap as a stamp instead.
4. none of the above.

I'm going for the fishnet. We'll see how that goes....