San Gabriel mountains & palm trees

I made this papercut as a housewarming gift for a friend from southern California who recently bought a place far away in North Carolina. To remind her of home, I designed a piece portraying the local San Gabriel mountains that hem in the LA area to the north, with one of SoCal's iconic rows of palm trees in the foreground. 

​

I've ​recently been experimenting with using torn layers of paper in my backgrounds, and the yellow paper here helped to add some visual interest and texture to the sky, without too harsh of a transition between the cream color background of the rest of the piece.