My Tree Ent Lives!
I have completely made over my guest room. It’s glorious. I’ve been having such a fun time with this project and it’s nearly complete. I’m so very delighted with how it’s turned out. (Full build tutorial here)
I started with an ombre paint job — the ceiling is a dark blue and it goes through a gradient of green to a bright yellow (the original color of the room) at the bottom. I added stars and galaxies on the ceiling with subtle purples and white spatters, and then created a zodiac mandala mural as ceiling art.
My vision was to build a tree sculpture in the corner, and use the space above the sliding door as a “treehouse” reading nook.
My tree is finished at last! It’s made from expanding foam and cardboard concrete form tubes from the hardware store, painted with latex paint. I’m pretty astonished at how good it looks, considering this it the first project of this type that I’ve done. It’s glorious. And it has a face!
A few build photos:
My house is surrounded by oak trees, so I wanted to make an oak inside as well. It took me a couple tries to get the coloring right, but having a bunch of examples right outside was super helpful. And I absolutely love the way the tree merges the inside and outside of my house — it looks like it grew right through the wall.
I’ve been in love with Tree Ents ever since reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy as a kid. I’ve never tried to “carve” a face before, so I kept it really simple and rough, and I think it turned out really great.
The eyes on the tree are made from Adafruit’s Monster M4sk, and hooked up to a motion sensor. Since this tree is in my guest room, I didn’t want my guests to be unable to sleep due to being “watched” all night, so the eyes wake up when someone approaches the tree, blink a few times, then fall back to sleep again. It’s perfect. It’s just perfect. 🙂
You can see more photos and follow my build tutorial on the Adafruit Learning System. I go into some detail about how I made the tree and lots of detail about adding the eyes. It’s actually a pretty easy project as electronics go, and I just can’t get over how much I love this guy. It’s like I have a new friend in my home, protecting me from evil spirits and keeping watch over my guests.
I also added fairy bottle lights in the tree, with four different LED color animations based on the four seasons. You can see that build tutorial here on the Adafruit Learning System.
