Two More Leaves

Last night, I had extra time to paint, so I did two paintings. For the first one, the leaf was a simpler shaped maple leave with less color variation. It was hard to paint!

For both of them, I wanted a darker background to try and make the leaf glow. I enjoyed mixing up the purples for the backgrounds.  As much as I love purple, I don't seem to paint with it much. I also tried going with dots/dashes for my paint strokes. To get enough color in the leaves, I had to go over them a lot,

It's been a good challenge to try and paint leaves.  One of the things that I'm finding is that it's hard to top Mother Nature.  She does an incredible job "painting" her leaves. I've been finding myself stopping to look at individual leaves more this fall. Earlier this week when I went out to get the morning paper, I was blown away by the beauty of some of the hostas in my front yard. Currently, some of them have striped leaves with striped green (both dark and light), yellow, and cream.