Observational Drawing- Still Life

These are all leaves that I found on my porch that fell from the dark red and orange/yellow trees in my yard. I set them up in a way I thought was pleasing, then put a container over them so that none of the wind or my siblings could mess up the formation (my sister still managed to, though). Fall is my favorite season, the color scheme of fall being my favorite, so I wanted to watercolor some leaves.

I started out with a basic sketch of the leaves with graphite pencil. I then used my smallest black pen for line art. Then I mixed liquid watercolors to match the leaves and painted them. I also used liquid watercolor for the background.

This work is mostly line, value, color, and space. I used line to make the shapes and creases in the leaves. I also used value to add shadow and depth. I would also say that there is space in the layering and shadow of the leaves. The most evolution took place because I experimented with medium a little bit. I hadn't used liquid watercolors before except for my beautiful oops project, and even then I didn't mix any colors for that project. I just used the pre mixed colors. While mixing colors for this project, I learned that what you see in the palette doesn't always look the same on paper. So I had to mess around with colors quite a bit. I also kept layering watercolor to make darker colors and to add shadow. At the end I added more line art to places where it had faded a bit. My next steps would probably to define the shadows more, and to provide more contrast between the leaves with similar colors.