It's All About the Leaves!

Our Diva Challenge this week is a string thing: Leaves!

Evidently Canada starts changing earlier in the year than Utah, because there isn't *much* color in the valley (though the mountainsides are starting to put on their finery)...and there's not many leaves on the ground. BUT walking around during my lunch break yesterday, I did find a couple of leaves. One, a maple.

In fact, wouldn't it be fun to decorate a leaf with tangles all over?

And what I ended up doing...well, I think it turned out amazing,, and I'm gonna do similar, with other autumn colors, and make a little montage for my wall.

This is how it looked after work last night.

 I have another piece that I started on, with a triplet of ash leaves, and a maple leaf traced on the paper. As I did one corner of the maple leaf in paradox, the idea hit me: a whole maple leaf, full of paradox!

So I set aside the first project, and started a new one, tracing the whole maple leaf in pencil, then penciling in triangles. (I will use pen for those triangles, for the other pieces I plan on doing in this set, because the pencil lines tend to glare.)

Weighting all my corners heavily, and rounding the edges made this look pretty cool. Right?

my first piece on colored paper

The stem looked flat though, so I added stippling along the edges, especially around the stem. I thought I might be done, but then decided to just add a little highlight on the edge of the stem...well...wow.

It's my white woodless color pencil and I LOVE what it does for my leaf!

Highlighting is different from shading, in that it is on the opposite side. so...there's a few places where the highlights are in the place where the shading would be (on the under side) but I realized how it had to be before I got very far with it, and finished the leaf with highlights on the upper edges of each segment.

This entire piece fits perfectly in one of my small frames...I found 20 or so frames at a yard sale, all matching, for .25c a piece...and it will be on my wall before the morning is over. AND! I will be starting another one similar, on a different color, maybe a different leaf shape. Same tangle, same highlighting.  Won't that be so cool!

In fact, I'm going out the door in a sec, to find some more leaves...the nearby park has an arboretum. I bet I can find leaves there.