Attended a wiring class at Bonsai West with Michael Levin which was really informative. Probably the biggest high level lesson was to wire the tree first and then design and style. By doing both simultaneously, you tend to get distracted and over think what you are trying to do.
For my subject, I chose the Japanese black pine I worked on last fall in Rodney Clemmons class. At that time, the tree was trastically pruned and needle pruned as well. I looked kind of scraggly and I decided to leave the styling and wiring to this winter.
It has been living in the shed throughout this winter except for those days in which the temperatures persisted below 20 degrees F for more than a day or two. There was a particularly cold week when we actually hit a nighttime low of -14 F. During this time, I brought the pine tree into the garage where the temp was in the upper 20'sto lower 30's. All winter, I watered the tree, maybe just once a month, to keep the soil slightly moist.
Overall, I wanted to ket some downward movement of the branches and some depth to the tree as well. There is a problem that the potential second branch is on the inside of a curve. I started with 2 5 mm wires up the main trunk to give enough support to add some movement to the apex. I then meticulously wired the die branced with 3 mm wire finally reducing to 1 mm for the branch tips. THe final result was:
