Leaf String Thing

Okay, I have had so much fun with the leaf challenge from The Diva. There is so much diversity of shapes to choose from, and autumn colors, and of course tangle patterns galore!

During a lovely walk, I selected different types of leaves, and brought them home.

willow, maple, cottonwood, sweet gum, birch

Paper Birch leaves are so elven and delicate

all the yellow leaves

The cottonwood leaf surprised me, because looking at it, there is such a symmetry about it. I ran with the cottonwood shape. I tried out the symmetry theme, but didn't like how it turned out, after two tries. So, I decided to monotangle a series of cottonwood leaves.

 The first one, after a lame attempt at symmetrical, was this stippled leaf. I love how 3D it went with the white highlights.

Part of me wanted to do architectural stuff. The lovely teardrop symmetry of the cottonwood, with a more linear, solid looking "building" tangle sounded great, so I did a leaf in Dex.

 And Florz seemed like a good "building" design. This is in brown, so in real life, it's not as visible, but I shaded with stippling, and then highlighted with an ivory pencil, and one little dot of white gel pen. THAT made me real happy.

This one is a simple swirl pattern with weighted lines. I call it "smoke" and use it as filler in some of my tiles, but packed in tight into this leaf, a few berries added, and then highlighting with white gel pen...not bad. Kinda sparkly.
I hung them on my wall with sticky stuff:

And, I also went with a variety of shapes. Initially I wanted to do everything with paradox as I did the original maple leaf, but when I looked at the string of the sweet gum leaf, it demanded betweed....so:

sweet gum leaves, framed

willow brooch

 This is my favorite, after the first maple leaf. It is a willow sprig, and the pattern is prestwood. I think a jeweler could make an amazing silver brooch directly from this piece. I just love it.

maple leaf, red

This one is smaller than the original maple leaf, and is on a taupe paper, using paradox in the same technique as the original maple leaf.

The original maple leaf. My first entry in the challenge.










And here is the montage, as it is on my wall:

I had another picture, but the glass from the frames picked up everything from the room behind me hahaha. It's nice with the piano in front, though.

FUN CHALLENGE!