When I saw this tree starting to die for the past few years, I didn't know what I wanted to change it to but this just struck me as something fun and also educational to some extent.

I first stripped all the bark. That really wasn't too hard because most of the tree had been dead for a couple years and the bark was already gone by this time. Just had a few recently deceased branches to take care of. The levels are just there to give me a persepective of how many life forms I needed to collect to add to it. The gray one on the ground is four feet long and the yellow one on top is six. I did end up cutting off some of the longer branches so that all of them were more even and it had a somewhat rounded shape to it.

Once I cut down each of the longer branches to the final size, I painted the entire tree white. I had selected around 100 images of animals. Some are extinct, some are mythical, ut most are still living, at least for now. After selecting the images, I reduced them to the size I needed and then printed each one out. Then I cut each out so I ended up with a stencil.

I then attached each image to the tree with glue dots that were supposed to be easy to remove. Then I painted around each image with black. The easy removal didn't work quite as advertised ... bummer! However, I was able to get them off, eventually. Finally, I had to do some touchup in both white and black paint to get clean images to show.

View from another angle.