Macro Leaf

The assignment for this project was to chose a number of leaves from outside and use some of them as a reference for a picture of a zoomed in section of them. The subject for this piece was obviously a leaf and I created it using multiple layers of a wide range of media like pens, highlights, watercolor pencil and water added to the watercolor pencil to fill the white space. I chose to create this specific artwork because this part of the leaf was the most interesting. The center of a leaf has the most veins and I thought it would definitely make the piece more interesting to draw a lot of veins, so I drew the center. I also thought that it would be much cooler if I varied the colors in the piece instead of leaving it all red, which was my original plan, so I made one half green and the other red.

I arranged the piece the way it is because I didn't want one section to draw more attention than the other. If I had made most of it red, the green would have been less noticeable, so instead, I centered the piece. In this piece, I used balance as my main technique. As I earlier explained, I did this because I wanted to not have a certain section attract more attention than other sections.

This piece evolved from the idea that it would just be watercolor pencil, to adding water to the watercolor pencil and finally to having multiple colors. I was originally going to have a solid red leaf with only watercolor pencil used, but that turned into a into a blend with water and two different sides that are different colors. These changes really enhanced my piece and I'm glad I used them. However, I am not as happy as I could be with this piece because overall, I feel like it is still a little bland and unexciting. I think that patterns in between the vein would really work in this piece and make it less bland. In the future, I will do my best to create a more interesting work of art, but I did learn a lot about blending and use of multiple media in this piece.